Market Research

Topic: Market research is crucial to a corporation’s marketing process. Find out the steps to carry out a market research. Wrapping can be imbedded in which step? Illustrate by an example of a market research.


Introduction
If you are an entrepreneur who plans to start a new business, or to improve and strengthen an existing business, then you must understand the importance of market research. Implemented during the planning stages for a new business, market research yields crucial data to determine consumer needs for a particular product or service, as well as to identify competitive businesses. An existing business can use market research and ongoing effective marketing to continually modify and improve products, services, practices, and customer service. Conducting market research can make all the difference between laying or building on a solid foundation, and not succeeding due to lack of vital information.
Body
What is market research?
Market research is about gathering, analysing and interpreting information for decision-making purposes. It is the method you use to determine the size and characteristics of your market - its preferences, opinions, habits and trends. It also enables you to be better informed than your competition.
Marketresearch helps you get to know:
Who your customers are
What your customers need
Where your product or service fits into the market
What your competitors offer.
Market research can be low-cost and you can do much of ityourself if you follow an orderly process.
Why research your market?
Business success cannot be guaranteed but market research can reduce the risks you take.
You might think you have a brilliant idea for a product or service but an idea alone is not enough. You must identify your target market - the people who will buy your product or service.
Market research will enable you to answer such questions as:
- What products or services to sell
- Where, in what quantities and at what prices to sell those products
- What competitors are selling, where they are, and their strengths.
Learning something about your market that you didn`t know can be one of the greatest thrills in business. You could, for instance, discover an unsatisfied need giving you a vital competitive edge.
Market research also enables you to attach numbers to your plans and verify your marketing strategy.
Steps to carry out market research

Managers need information in order to introduce products and services that create value in the mind of the customers. But the perception of value is a subjective one, and what customer value this year may be quite different from what they value next year. As such, the attributes that create value cannot simply be deduced from common knowledge. So it’s obviously data must be collected and analyzed. The goal of marketing research is to provide the facts and direction that managers need to make their more important marketing decisions.
To maximize the benefit of marketing research, those who use it need to understand the research process or the steps to carry out a market research.

Steps 1: Problem definition
In this first stage the researcher has to identify the problem that needs to be investigated. The kind of information you are seeking will determine the type of research that you will do. The researcher has to take into account the purpose of the study, the relevant background information, what information is needed, and how it will be used in decision making. Problem definition involves discussion with the decision makers, interviews with industry experts, analysis of secondary data, and sometimes some qualitative research should be conducted. Defining a marketing research can be difficult. Especially the researchers who are new, have no experience could easily interpret symptoms or causes as a problem. Unlike symptoms and causes, a research problem lays the foundations of what needs to be investigated.
Once the problem has been precisely defined, the research can be designed and conducted properly.
Step 2: Research design
A research design is a blueprint for conducting a market research project. It details the procedures necessary for obtaining the required information, and its purpose is to design a study that will test the hypotheses of interest, determine possible answers to the research questions, and provide the information needed for decision making. The issue of how the data should be obtained from the respondents (for example, by conducting a survey or an experiment) must be addressed. It is also necessary to design a questionnaire and a sampling plan to select respondents for the study.
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A questionnaire (for instant)
Because of its strategic role, the research design considers what research methods are best for collecting data and which are most suitable for analyzing the data collected. The choice of methods will depend on how suitable a method is for addressing the problem set and the research strategy a research subscribes to.
Step 3: Data collection
Data Collection in Marketing Research is a detailed process in which a planned search for all relevant data is made by researcher.
Types of Data
Secondary data is the data that is collected for some purpose other than the problem. Secondary data include information made available by business and government sources, commercial marketing research firms, and