Systems Administrator

Outline the 4 steps in the marketing research process.

Marketing research process is the systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data for the purpose of knowledge development and decision making. The reasons and times at which your company or organization might consider performing marketing research varies, but the general purpose of gaining intelligence for decision making remains constant throughout.

1) Defining the problem and setting the research objectives.

A clear statement of the problem is a key to good research. A firm may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing market research, but if it has not correctly identified the problem, those dollars are wasted. Objectives of a research must be laid down as precisely as possible. Objectives are set so that when achieved they provide the necessary information to solve the problem. A good way of setting research objectives is to ask, "What information is needed in order to solve the problem?" The objectives might be to explore the nature of a problem so you may further define it, or perhaps it is to determine how many people will buy your product packaged in a certain way and offered at a certain price. Specificity of objectives would depend on types of research that are:

a) Exploratory research - It is defined as collecting information in an unstructured and informal way. For example, a restaurant owner may regularly eat at competing restaurants in order to gather information about menu selections, prices and service quality. This approach works well when the marketer doesn't have an understanding of the particular market or the market is new, and it is hard to pinpoint the research direction.

b) Descriptive research - The focus of descriptive research is to provide an accurate description and/or explanation for something that is occurring. For example, what age group is buying a particular brand, what is a product's market share in a specific geographic region, how many competitors a company faces, etc? This type of research is by far the most popular form of marketing research. But to be considered useful it must be conducted correctly, which means the marketer must adhere to a strict set of research requirements to capture relevant results.

c) Causal research - this is conducted by controlling various factors to determine which factor is causing the problem. It allows you to isolate causes and effects. By changing one factor, say price you can monitor its effects on a key consequence such as sales. Although causal research can give you a high level of understanding of the variable you are studying, the designs often require experiments that are complex and expensive. For example, when a company producing blue colour denim jeans decided to produce their jeans in white colour, casual research can measure the impact of the company by changing the colour to white. The company also has to decide whether changing the colour to white would be profitable. To summarise, casual research is a way of seeing how actions now will affect business in the future.

2) Developing a research plan

There are two types of information available to a market researcher: primary data and secondary data. Primary data is original information gathered for a specific purpose. Secondary data refers to information that already exists somewhere and has been collected for some other purposes. Secondary research is usually faster and less expensive to obtain than primary research. Gathering secondary research may be as simple as making a trip to a library or browsing the internet. Secondary data help identify the problem; better define problem; develop an approach to problem; formulate an appropriate research design; answer certain research questions and test some research hypotheses; interpret primary data more insightfully.

Research approach can be done in several ways;

a) Surveys - This method captures respondent information through the input of responses to a research instrument, such as questionnaire. Questionnaire can be done by either street survey, through phone or even faster way of completing online survey. Street survey will be costly as it requires manpower overhead to conduct the survey on one to one basis. With the technology of internet, online survey is one of the most effective and efficient way of gathering information. There is however a danger of using online survey; this will exclude those without internet access, those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, older people and those with literacy difficulties. E.g. many years back, SBC, the then MediaCorp used this survey method to find out the popularity of the artistes by mailing the pictures and names of the artistes to every household and calling them to do the survey through phone.

b) Experiment - marketers often use experiments to gauge how the manipulation of one marketing variable will affect another. For e.g. a market researcher for a retail chain may want to study what the effect on sales would be if a point-of-purchase display is moved to different locations in a store. Unfortunately, performing highly controlled experiments can be quite costly. Another