Research is an important tool, it helps organisations to discover what is happening in their marketing environment. There are many examples of organisations failing because they did not respond to changes in their marketing environment. Organisations need to be proactive and change in line with their marketing environment.
Examples of questions that research aims to answer include
There are two types of research, market research and marketing research; A common mistake made by many students and textbooks is to confuse the difference between the two.
Market Research: Involves researching specific industries or markets. For example researching the computer industry to discover the number of competitors and their market share is market research.
Marketing Research: Marketing Research goes further. The aim of marketing research is to find a solution to a problem or to decide how to use a marketing opportunity. It can involve researching how to implement the whole marketing process from initial data collection through to product launch and post launch process. Or it could concentrate on a specific element of marketing for example how to advertise a product and improve declining sales
Marketing Research can involve researching how to implement the whole marketing process from initial data collection through to product launch and post launch process. Or it could concentrate on a specific element of marketing for example how to advertise a product and improve declining sales
Researchers collect two types of data
Qualitative Data: Focuses on people’s opinions and attitudes towards a product or service. It focuses on the reasons behind people's opinions and motivation. Typical ways to collect qualitative data include focus groups, questionnaires, interviews and observations of people in a specific setting.
Qualitative data usually involves small groups of people or individuals so that researchers can fully explore why people "feel" the way they do. Researchers will be looking for detailed answers from the people particpating in the reserach. Qualitative data collection is invaluable for product design and marketing research.
Quantitative Data: Focuses on collecting data which can be organised into numerical analysis. It may still focus on people's attitudes but its about what they think from a numerical point of view. For example rating something on a scale of 1 to 10 or collecting data to calculate what percentage of people like a product. As quantitative data is research which will be used for numerical analysis, the questions used to collect it are usually narrow and specific. The questions also require a short and simple answer for example yes/no or a number.
