Marketing Research Importance

            The intent of any marketing research is to answer questions like how much a competitor is charging for its product. How many of one company’s customer buys from the competitors? How does a company’s customers or target market behave and what is their present and future preference structure? All these questions provide valuable input to the company’s marketing plan, which leads to a successful promotion of the product.

            Therefore, asking the right questions for marketing research is very important. For example, lot of company spend lot of money surveying the customers to determine how well its products or services are received, instead of asking customers’ preferences and needs with respect to the product (Shark, 1994).

            It is always difficult to conduct an effectiveness marketing research in this changing economic, political and social environment. According to Baker and Mouncey (2003), “industry has not moved quickly enough and appears to have been struck by a level of inertia characteristic of ‘cultural prisoners’ – those who find themselves doing things the way they’ve always been done simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done.” They suggested that the market researchers should become ‘cultural architects’ to break out of their cultural prison. One of the insights they proposed is the customer-driven marketing process that focuses on customer needs and wants through understanding, creation and delivery of value.  Finally, a good marketing research provides objective information to reduce uncertainty, which is the main concern of any management decision (Demirdjian, 2003).

Marketing Research Methodology

            According to Demirdjian (2003) there are three kinds of marketing research: descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive. Descriptive research is aim to gather and present factual statement. For example, it describes the consumer’s attitude towards a product. Diagnostic research attempts to explain the data. For instance, it tries to explain the impact on sales of a change in advertising. Finally, diagnostic research tries to explain what if questions like, what will happen to the sales of a product, if the competitor introduces a better alternative?  

            Once the research purpose is defined the second step is research approach. There are two ways of approaching a marketing problem: quantitative and qualitative (Kim, 2003). Quantitative research is controlled by the researchers and uses statistical methods to give a general conclusion. On the other hand qualitative research is less formalized, but gives a deeper and more complete understanding of the data. Qualitative approach gives a deeper understanding of the research problem, but draws no general conclusion. According to Chadwick, quantitative research cannot explain customers need properly and he suggested that the market researchers should use “data mining techniques as a ‘core competency’ to provide the comprehensive, multidimensional insight…” (Cited in Baker & Mouncey, 2003).

            The third step is research strategy. According to Yin (2002) there are three major research strategies: experiments, surveys and case studies. Which research strategy to be used depends on the type of question pose. For example, experiment research tries to answer how and why. Survey answers who, what, where, how many, how much. The, case study also tries to answers how and why; however, the difference between experiment research and case study is that experiment research requires that the researcher have control over behavioral events (Yin, 2002).

            The final three steps are data collection, sample selection and data analysis. At this stage the marketing researcher systematically and objectively gather information and analyze them by using statistics or any other means to reach a final marketing decision. These final steps of marketing research also most paint striking process because of the amount of time and resources it requires to finish.  The manufacturer of high-tech products with short life cycle require fast and accurate information for to find out how many units to produce. However, the traditional data collection process is too slow to keep up with this kind of demand. So, the researchers are looking for alternative ways and the market survey through World Wide Web offers a good solution of the demand for high-speed data collection.

Internet as a Marketing Research Tool

            According to Sang Kim (2003) the second generation marketing researchers are taking advantage of the two major research approach: the quantitative and the qualitative approach. With the help of internet researchers can hand their quantitative survey in the hand of the target sample very fast. At the same time the researchers can also perform online qualitative research through focus group that provides good insight on consumers’ needs and demands.

            Kim (2003) also pointed out five advantages of online research over traditional ones:

 Source: Kim, (2003)

            McCullough (1998) pointed out some important distinctions between online and traditional survey methods. According to McCullough (1998) finding the target market is not very difficult, because the target market finds the researcher, by visiting web-sites relevant to their interest. Moreover, web surveys have more flexibility and control; because it allows the researcher to put ranges and other limitations. For example, the survey will not accept answers like someone weigh 10,000 pounds.

Discussion and Conclusion

            I work for a small actuarial consulting firm and we do not conduct any marketing survey or research. In fact, we do not have any well thought marketing plan. The only kind of marketing we do is by word of mouth or attending pension seminars to meet potential clients. Besides we do not have the resource to conduct the kind of marketing research methodology mentioned above. However, we do have a web page and we get a fairly good numbers of hits every month. So, I believe a web based marketing plan would be our best hope. We could put banner ads on the web sites where potential clients frequently go or look for service. We could also buy email list to solicit potential clients. Most importantly, we could use the results of our banner ad and email to perform our own marketing research. The best part is all these things could be done with significantly less or no cost.

            It appears that the World Wide Web has opened up a new door of market research for both big and small organizations and it is helping the researchers to build a better marketing toolbox for future research.

References