Marketing Research

Marketing Research

Kudler Fine Foods is a gourmet grocery store that has experienced significant growth and is now focused on expanding its services, improving the efficiency of its operations, and increasing the consumer purchase cycle. Kudler Fine Foods has continued to grow and is now ready to make significant changes to increase revenue and customer satisfaction. Kudler Fine Foods is a gourmet grocery store and recent market surveys have shown that they have continued to exceed customer’s satisfaction in every area except one: the cost of merchandise. By exploring ways to decrease costs by doing the market research, Kudler Fine Foods will experience an increase in customer satisfaction.

Market research is the method of gathering, recording and analyzing of data about consumers, competitors and the market. Market research can help create a business plan, launch a new product or service, fine tune existing products and services, expand into new markets (Armstrong & Kotler, 2005). It can be used to decide which portion of the population will purchase the product based on variables like age, gender, location and income level. It can be find out the characteristics of the target market.

Marketing research is a type of business study. It is a form of applied sociology which focuses on understanding the behaviors of customers in a market-based economy (Kerin, Hartley, Berkowitz, & Rudelis, 2006). Market research plays an important role in every aspect of an organization’s strategy of expansion. Since Kudler Fine Foods is expanding services then it needs to know about their competitors. Market research will help Kudler Fine Foods management in determining where they stand in contrast with competitors. This research will also help identify Kudler’s market share. Using this information, Kudler Fine Foods will be able to identify where it is stronger than its competitors and then build upon its strength to increase its lead over their rivals. Similarly, market research can help it to identify their potentially weak areas and devise ways to overcome them, thus gaining on any rivals who excel in such areas. Additional market research may be needed in areas such as the identification of potential target customers, new areas and new marketing and sales promotions.

Utilizing the benchmark process to determine best practices will help key decision makers in developing streamlined production processes. Competitive intelligence and analysis will help it to formulate ways to stay ahead of its competitors (Perreault & McCarthy, 2004). Competitive intelligence is defined as researching the business environment a firm operates in, in order to influence its emerging strategy for business development or the process of gathering actionable information on the competitive environment (Kerin, Hartley, Berkowitz, & Rudelis, 2006). This process is very important to a business which is trying to grow its customer base. Kudler Fine Foods would need to analyze some of the marketing strategy and tactics used by their competitors. For example,