What is marketing research?
It’s the process of gathering information to understand attitudes and behaviors of consumers. This is useful for business to achieve its aimed marketing goal. The examples are understanding target consumers’ preference towards a product which a company is going to launch in the market. This would help a company ensure that the particular product would be able to best serve customers’ needs, understanding brand image among target consumers for a company to generate precise brand strategies, understanding customer segmentation of product category A (How many segments, How large each segment is, how about each segment’s demography, e.g., gender, age, How their values of beliefs are, etc.) for a company to launch precise strategies for each segment.
Steps of marketing research
Main steps are:
We should know first which information we would like to get from this research, e.g., want to know which product consumers prefer between Product A and B.
In fact, business objectives have to come first, before research objectives. In other words, a company might have some business issues or situations which lead to needs for research. For instance, a company wants to launch a new product to increase sales revenue (Business objectives). Then, a company wants to know which products consumers prefer. This is the reason why we have to do consumer research to study which product consumers prefer (between A and B) and reasons why (Research objectives)
Specify details of target consumers we want to study. Those details could be demography, like gender, age, occupation, or product usage behavior, e.g., have been using Service A of Brand A1 for xx period, or specify usage frequency, etc.
Main types of information collected in marketing research are quantitative data and qualitative information. There are many data collection methods in details for each data type.
