Marketing research
Consumer marketing research or market research is a form of applied sociology that concentrates on understanding the behaviours, whims and preferences, of consumers in a market-based economy, and aims to understand the effects and comparative success of marketing campaigns.
Research is the scholarly or scientific practice of gathering existing or new information in order to enhance one's knowledge of a specific area. Research has many categories, from medicine to literature. Marketing research, or market research, is a form of business research and is generally divided into two categories: consumer market research and business-to-business (B2B) market research, which was previously known as industrial marketing research. Consumer marketing research studies the buying habits of individual people while business-to-business marketing research investigates the markets for products sold by one business to another.
Types of marketing research
Marketing research techniques come in many forms, including:
Ad Tracking – periodic or continuous in-market research to monitor a brand's performance using measures such as brand awareness, brand preference, and product usage.
Advertising Research – used to predict copy testing or track the efficacy of advertisements for any medium, measured by the ad’s ability to get attention, communicate the message, build the brand’s image, and motivate the consumer to purchase the product or service.
Brand equity research - how favorably do consumers view the brand?
Brand name testing - what do consumers feel about the names of the products?
Commercial eye tracking research - examine advertisements, package designs, websites, etc by analyzing visual behavior of the consumer
Concept testing - to test the acceptance of a concept by target consumers
Coolhunting - to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends in areas such as fashion, music, films, television, youth culture and lifestyle
Buyer decision processes research - to determine what motivates people to buy and what decision-making process they use
Copy testing – predicts in-market performance of an ad before it airs by analyzing audience levels of attention, brand linkage, motivation, entertainment, and communication, as well as breaking down the ad’s flow of attention and flow of emotion. Customer satisfaction studies - exit interviews or surveys that determine a customer's level of satisfaction with the quality of the transaction
Demand estimation - to determine the approximate level of demand for the product
Distribution channel audits - to assess distributors’ and retailers’ attitudes toward a product, brand, or company
Internet strategic intelligence - searching for customer opinions in the Internet: chats, forums, web pages, blogs... where people express freely about their experiences with products, becoming strong "opinion formers"
Marketing effectiveness and analytics - Building models and measuring results to determine the effectiveness of individual marketing activities.
Mystery shopping - An employee or representative of the market research firm anonymously contacts a salesperson and indicates he or she is shopping for a product. The shopper then records the entire experience. This method is often used for quality control or for researching competitors' products.
Positioning research - how does the target market see the brand relative to competitors? - what does the brand stand for?
Price elasticity testing - to determine how sensitive customers are to price changes
Sales forecasting - to determine the expected level of sales given the level of demand. With respect to other factors like Advertising expenditure, sales promotion etc.
Segmentation research - to determine the demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics of potential buyers
Online panel - a group of individual who accepted to respond to marketing research online
Store audit - to measure the sales of a product or product line at a statistically selected store sample in order to determine market share, or to determine whether a retail store provides adequate service
Test marketing - a small-scale product launch used to determine the likely acceptance of the product when it is introduced into a wider market
Viral Marketing Research - refers to marketing research designed to estimate the probability that specific communications will be transmitted throughout an individuals Social Network. Estimates of Social Networking Potential(SNP) are combined with estimates of selling effectiveness to estimate ROI on specific combinations of messages and media.
All of these forms of marketing research can be classified as either problem-identification research or as problem-solving research.
A company collects primary research by gathering original data. Secondary research is conducted on data published previously and usually by someone else. Secondary research costs far less than primary research, but seldom comes in a form that exactly meets the needs of the researcher.
A similar distinction exists between exploratory research and conclusive research. Exploratory research provides insights into and comprehension of an issue or situation. It should draw definitive conclusions only with extreme caution. Conclusive research draws conclusions: the results of the study can be generalized to the whole population.
Exploratory research is conducted to explore a problem to get some basic idea about the solution at the preliminary stages of research. It may serve as the input to conclusive research. Exploratory research information is collected by focus group interviews, reviewing literature or books, discussing with experts, etc. This is unstructured and qualitative in nature. If a secondary source of data is unable to serve the purpose, a convenience sample of small size can be collected. Conclusive research is conducted to draw some conclusion about the problem. It is essentially, structured and quantitative research, and the output of this research is the input to management information systems (MIS).
Exploratory research is also conducted to simplify the findings of the conclusive or descriptive research, if the findings are very hard to interpret for the marketing manager.
Marketing research methods
Methodologically, marketing research uses the following types of research designs:[1]
Based on questioning:
Qualitative marketing research - generally used for exploratory purposes - small number of respondents - not generalizable to the whole population - statistical significance and confidence not calculated - examples include focus groups, in-depth interviews, and projective techniques
Quantitative marketing research - generally used to draw conclusions - tests a specific hypothesis- uses random sampling techniques so as to infer from the sample to the population - involves a large number of respondents - examples include surveys and questionnaires
Based on observations:
Ethnographic studies -, by nature qualitative, the researcher observes social phenomena in their natural setting - observations can occur cross-sectionally (observations made at one time) or longitudinally (observations occur over several time-periods) - examples include product-use analysis and computer cookie traces
Experimental techniques -, by nature quantitative, the researcher creates a quasi-artificial environment to try to control spurious factors, then manipulates at least one of the variables - examples include purchase laboratories and test markets
Researchers often use more than one research design. They may start with secondary research to get background information, then conduct a focus group (qualitative research design) to explore the issues. Finally they might do a full nation-wide survey (quantitative research design) in order to devise specific recommendations for the client.
