What is market research?
In the conditions of a perfect market economy, market research is an essential and significant element of marketing in business enterprises. Market research is the basis for making a certain management decision, as well as for solving a specific problem.
The specificity of the problem determines the direction of the market research, which in its essence is a process of purposeful collection, analysis, and evaluation of data.
Definition of market research
The American Marketing Association defines market research as a function that connects the consumer and society with the market through information and data used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems.
All these efforts aim to generate, improve, and evaluate marketing actions, control marketing performance, and to improve understanding of marketing as a process.
What is Marketing Survey
The Marketing Survey identifies the information needed to obtain these results, as well as the projects and methods for recruiting. information, manages and executes in the process of data collection, analyzes the results, presents the conclusions and their application.
Market research can be defined as a systematic, ongoing process. This ensures reliable management and executive activity within a company. It can also be perceived as targeted actions carried out in a certain sequence with the help of specific equipment and technology to solve a competitive, significant marketing problem. In practice, a marketing study can be carried out differently depending on the goals of the company, its knowledge, and experience in this field. etc.
Market research types
The division of market research into different types can be done by different criteria, as a marketing study can be assigned to different types depending on the chosen criteria.
The most commonly used criteria are chosen according to:
- the strategic orientation of the study to open new market opportunities and utilize existing ones;
- the life cycle of the product introduction, growth, maturity, decline;
- the service of the decision-making process, dispute the type of data obtained;
- the type of data sources;
- the applied strategy and method of data acquisition. Reference: When Data Creates Competitive Advantage by Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright
The strategic orientation of the studies
According to the strategic orientation of the study are divided into the product for the discovery of new and to improve existing products and market for the discovery of new market opportunities, as well as for the exploitation of opportunities research channels for distribution and advertising. product image, success in completing the product line.
The study of product quality is difficult to separate from consumer preferences, but here we consider the optimal combination between price and product quality, always bearing in mind that quality is ultimately assessed by consumers, ie Product accessories are of higher quality when there is a higher consumer value.
Product accessories mean the packaging, brand, and price, which undoubtedly affect the consumer's behavior and preferences for the respective product and will help to make the necessary management decisions and actions.
The main types of market research include the following topics
The main types of market research cover: market research studies provide an opportunity to determine the target market; sales research consists in the quantitative measurement of sales. of purchasing motivation a lot of valuable information that will give us an answer to the question of why buy our product or that of the competition, study of consumer habits need to know the habits of consumers because very often they determine whether to buy a product or not.
The pre-introduction phase of concept and tests
The pre-introduction phase includes concept tests, product laboratory tests, positioning research, brand name tests, packaging, advertising concepts, real market tests, introduction phase, market share research, product availability, product awareness, consumer reactions, reuse, growth phase, consumer behavior study, segmentation studies, sales forecasts, mature phase, a study of new consumer applications of the product, diversification studies, competition strategy study, availability study product and advertising effectiveness, phase of "decline" study of price elasticity, study to reduce costs.
According to the service of the decision-making process, research is divided into preliminary, actual, final, and follow-up. Preliminary research is necessary when there are no more reliable ways to identify the marketing problem or the risk of misidentification would be too great gather information to properly define the problem, properly understand its environment, and verify the data that indicated the presence of this problem, the actual study should allow finding different alternatives to solve the already identified problem when there are no routines ways to directly find alternatives in solving the problem and at the same time the risk of wrong decisions is too great, the final studies allow on the basis of the collected and processed information to propose specific measures, follow-up studies are used to identify and identify divergent it from the normal “behavior of the basic parameters of the company, thus identifying the relevant problems.
Quantitative and qualitative market research
According to the type of data obtained, surveys are divided into: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research is conducted when the marketing problem is sufficiently well defined, the solution of which requires quantitative data, subjected to appropriate processing.
These studies are strictly formalized and run in a certain sequence As a rule, these surveys are based on large samples of respondents. The collected quantitative data are processed using statistical techniques through appropriate computer programs. The most important feature of quantitative surveys is their representativeness.
They require complex organization, large budget, a team of diverse specialists, and enough qualitative research is used in cases where the solution of the problem can not be done on the basis of quantitative data but requires understanding, reasoning, explanation, etc. They are used to identify and formulate marketing problems and hypotheses, as well as and in the need to make sense of and explain the quantitative data.
Studies based on secondary and primary data
According to the type of marketing data sources, the studies are divided into studies based on secondary data "office study" or "field study" and studies based on primary data "field study" or "field study". The golden rule in conducting each study is that before proceeding to the collection of primary data, we must exhaust all possibilities for finding secondary data. In many cases, they are sufficient to solve the problem or reduce the need for a large amount of primary data. The study is cheaper, is carried out more quickly, and in many cases proves to be extremely necessary, as it helps to more accurately formulate the topic of the study, research hypotheses, planning surveys, interviews, etc. The field study is carried out by collecting primary data targeted from the original source. Primary data are collected using different methods.
Depending on the methods used, studies can be implemented in different ways and forms: quantitative methods are unstructured, flexible, and adaptive, usually used to generate ideas and hypotheses.
By using them, the research can be in the form of an unstructured interview, group discussions, projective methods using proactive techniques, expert evaluation, etc. The method of observation provides data on the actual behavior of various economic entities. When using this method, the survey can be: simple, on, secret, self-monitoring, observation "by record", etc .; the survey this method is expressed in the systematic collection of structured data From the use of this method, the survey can be conducted as a direct personal, postal, home survey, a survey of respondents, street survey, group survey, personal interview, group interview, telephone interview.
When using the experimental method, the causal relationships between two or more variables are investigated by introducing changes in the independent variables when tracking the changes in the dependent variables. There are two main types of laboratory and field experiments. of formulaic, descriptive, and experimental.
The market research as a concept includes a daily and continuous collection of data
Apart from the fact that market research as a concept includes the daily and continuous collection of data on the marketing environment, it is also a consequence of some contradiction between what is desired and achieved or the presence of untapped, existing, and new opportunities.
The identified or insufficiently unambiguously formulated problem can lead to high costs of money, time, and labor, without any coverage. and researchers can make sense of it in terms of the requirements of market research. the problem itself contains the object.
Related to many problems, this is the market of a product or group of products. Each real object is a set of many variables, but the problem itself allows some of these variables to be removed, and based on the other variables the subject of the study is obtained. this gradually narrows the field of study by focusing only on those variables that are relevant to the problem being studied.
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