All posts in Market Research

The future success of your business depends on your ability to perform meaningful market research. Does this come as a surprise? It shouldn’t.

Market research allows you to:

• Measure customer satisfaction
• Make your marketing more efficient
• Find new customers
• Develop a customer-centric product development cycle

Assuming that you are selling a useful good or service, knowing any or all of the bullet points above would be considered useful by most business people.

A study done by an Australian research group discovered that firms that had strong market research capabilities had greater sales growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and new product success rates were firms that had significantly greater market research abilities (Vorhies, Harker, Rao 1999).

Market research is a complicated thing. This is because the research revolves around people. However, here are some things you might want to know when trying to improve you market research abilities:

Be Brave – When you start digging for information, sometimes you find stuff that will shock you. Think of Domino’s Pizza and their new advertising campaign.

Use statistical analysis – In the book Meaningful Marketing, Doug Hall says, “Statistics are required if you are to make decisions that are reliable and reproducible. Research without statistics is about as reliable as your horoscope.” Statistics are not fun to do, but an understanding of what data are saying is imperative to improving your marketing research ability.

Use many research methods – From the Domino’s video above, it appears that they are making a very wide set of assumptions based on some focus groups. I’m sure that Domino’s would not try to overhaul their pizza operations based on a few focus groups. I’m sure they had more data, but regression analysis outputs are not very exciting to look at in commercials. When trying to improve your market research abilities it is important to become familiar with many research techniques and each technique’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, focus groups provide a lot of depth to your research, however, focus groups are small and should not stand alone as representative of your target market or customer base.

Think like a scientist – Back in school I took a lot of science classes. These classes taught me, through example and practice, that nearly all major scientific discoveries have come about via the use of the scientific method. This means that a scientist made an observation, asked a question, proposed a hypothesis, designed an experiment, collected data, analysed the data, made a conclusion, and in many cases asked another question based on the conclusion – which started the process all over again.

This article was sourced from serfwerks.com – click here to read the whole article.

It’s official, South Africa has fallen into a recession for the first time in 17 years.

South Africa’s economy decreased by 6,4% in the first quarter of 2009, which is worse than the market expected.

The next few years will be hard on all businesses and intelligent decisions need to be made with marketing budgets.

Why is Market Research still important?

During an economic struggle, opportunities cannot be missed. Company resources are limited for the marketing and development of company products and services, therefore fewer products and services will be offered.

Conducting Market Research can help reduce the risk of product or service failure by providing consumer insight into the demands of the current market, rather than relying on trial and error.

A fair amount of prediction is needed before launching new products and services, which market research can reduce by providing key information about the wants and needs of consumers.

“Market research is the process of systematic collecting, organizing and analyzing data and information about customers, competitors and the market.”

Thousands of jobs are being cut to improve business efficiency, but strategic marketing is the key to differentiate decent companies from the elite. Analyzing your consumer base is a key method to ensure that your business is offering the best quality service to the right customers.

Market Research can be used to find ways to create a better quality experience for each of those consumer groups. Many consumers are cutting back on spending and this creates an opportunity to offer them products which will save money and promote efficiency.

To help survive in a declining economy, it’s advised to promote your company using intelligent and innovative marketing, rather than cutting marketing spend altogether. Researching growth opportunities can prepare your business for a faster recovery when the markets resurface.