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Carrying out marketing research.

Article Excerpt
[check] This checklist has been designed to explain the basic steps of marketing research.

The use of marketing research has become increasingly prevalent since the 1980s. This has partly happened as a result of the quality revolution that swept through many organisations. At the heart of the quality movement is the notion that organisations need to get close to customers; in order to do this, they need to listen to what those customers really want. Marketing research is one of the main ways of finding this out.

Definition

For the purposes of this checklist, market research and marketing research are interchangeable terms, that are used to define a data gathering and analysis process which aims to provide information on the sale of products or services, and the customers who buy them.

But the research process goes a lot further into the areas of:

market size and key market sectors market brand shares

identifying potential customers identifying needs that may not have been articulated information on competitors defining actual and potential market sizes. While there is much that marketing research can do, mostly it is directed towards discovering which groups or market sectors will buy your product, and what improvements, replacements or new related products may be desirable.

There is a range of different methodologies for carrying out marketing research--surveys, questionnaires, High...

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