MARKETING RESEARCH

 Introduction to marketing Research

Understanding market research and using it to your advantage is vital in reaching out to your target audience and increasing your sales.

Understand the needs of existing customers and why they chose your service over competitors.

Identify new business opportunities and changing market trends.

Market research is one of the key factors used in maintaining competitiveness over competitors.

Market-research techniques encompass both qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, as well as quantitative techniques such as customer surveys, and analysis of secondary data.

Need and Importance of Marketing Research

The most important task of a marketer is to get the right product at the right place with the right price to the right person. Besides, it was also necessary to go back and find whether consumer is getting optimum satisfaction, so that consumer remains loyal. These aspects made it imperative for the marketers to conduct marketing research.

The following points explain the need for and importance of marketing research:

1. Identifying problem and opportunities in the market: It helps in identifying new market opportunities for existing and new products. It provides information on market share, nature of competition, customer satisfaction levels, sales performances and channel of distribution. This helps the firms in solving problems.

2. Formulating market strategies: Today, markets are no more local. They have become global. Manufactures find it difficult to contact customers and control distribution channels. Competition is equally severe. The consumer needs are difficult to predict. Market segmentation is a complicated task in such wide markets. The marketing intelligence provided through marketing research not only helps in framing but also in implementing the market strategies.

3. Determining consumer needs and wants: Marketing has become customer-centric. However, large-scale production needs intermediaries for mass distribution. Due to prevalence of multi channels of distribution, there is an information gap. Marketing research helps in collecting information on consumers from structured distribution research and helps in making marketing customer oriented.

4. For effective communication mix: In an era of micro- rather than mass-marketing, communication plays a vital role. Marketing research uses promotional research to study media mix, advertising effectiveness and integrated communication tools. Research on such aspects will help in promoting effectively a company’s product in the market.

5. Improving selling activities: Marketing research is used to analyse and evaluate performances of a company within a market. It also studies effectiveness of a sales force. It helps in identifying sales territories. Such information helps the companies in identifying areas of shortcoming in sales. It also examines alternative methods for distribution of goods.

6. For sales forecasting: The most challenging task for any production manager is to keep optimum levels of inventory. However, production is undertaken in anticipation of demand. Therefore, scientific forecast of sales is required.

Marketing research helps in sales forecasting by using market share method, sales force estimate method and jury method. This can also help in fixing sales quotas and marketing plans.

7. To revitalize brands: Marketing research is used to study and find out the existing brand position. It finds out the recall value of brands. It explores the possibilities of brand extension or prospects of changing existing brand names.

The main purpose of marketing is to create brand loyalty. Marketing research helps in developing techniques to popularize and retain brand loyalty.

8. To facilitate smooth introduction of new products: Marketing research helps in testing the new products in one or two markets on a small scale. This helps in finding out consumer response to new product and develop a suitable marketing mix. It reveals the problems of the customers regarding new products. Thus, it controls the risk involved in introducing a new product.

9. Determine export potentials: The development in transport and communication has helped in globalization and digitalization of world trade. This has helped in boosting the growth of international markets. Marketing research helps in conducting market survey for export. It. collects information on marketing environment prevailing in a country. By collecting data on consumers from different countries, it indicates export potentials.

10. Managerial decision-making: Marketing research plays a vital role in the decision-making processes by supplying relevant, up-to-date and accurate data to the decision-makers. Managers need up-to-date information to access customer needs and wants, market situation, technological change and extent of competition.