Q.1 What are the nature, scope and features of Marketing Research? Answer : The Role of Marketing Research in Strategic Planning and Decision Making
Our primary focus is on the role of marketing research in marketing strategy decisions.
A. Identifying Marketing Opportunities and Constraints
Identifying marketing opportunities and constraints is a logical starting point for developing marketing strategies.
1. Embracing the Marketing Concept
Conducting marketing research to understand customers is becoming widespread as an increasing number of firms embrace the marketing concept (the philosophy of customer orientation urging firms to uncover customer needs first and then coordinate all their activities to satisfy those needs).
2. Understanding the Competitive Environment
Marketing research is vital to maintaining and improving a company’s overall
Competitiveness.
- Unless managers understand the external environment, they cannot intelligently plan for the future.
- Many organizations continually collect and evaluate environmental information to identify future market opportunities and threats.
B. Developing and Implementing Marketing Strategies
To benefit fully from the opportunities uncovered in the marketplace, a firm must develop an effective marketing strategy with an effective marketing mix:
- the nature of its product
- ways to promote the product
- the price charged to potential customers
- the means used to make the product available to them
-
Good marketing research will identify whether the marketing mix is effective enough to maximize the benefits to the firm from available opportunities (sales, profits, customer satisfaction, and value.
Some of the most successful new-product introductions have been preceded by extensive marketing research that helped develop one or more elements of their marketing mixes.
C. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Marketing Plans
Getting feedback from the marketplace and taking corrective action for elements of products or services that need fixing is often referred to as controlling or the control function. Controlling is an important component of the planning and decision-making process and another area in which marketing research provides solutions.
To succeed in the marketplace, a firm must at least periodically monitor market conditions, usually by obtaining feedback from customers, and answer control-related questions such as:
- What is the market share of our product?
- Is its share increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?
- Who are its users?
- Are the nature of the users and the volume of their purchases consistent with our expectations (goals)? If not, why not?
Only marketing research, not marketers’ intuition, can yield accurate answers to such questions.
Nature of Marketing Research
Marketing research is systematic and objective collection of data, its analysis and evaluation, and decision making in respect of specific aspects of a marketing problem.
Marketing Research and Market Research:- The nature of marketing research cannot be properly understood without knowing the meaning of market research. Market research is the gathering, recording and analyzing of market data to identify the present and potential customers and their motives and buying habits. It is the discovery of the capacity of the market to absorb the products of a firm. It is a part of the marketing research. It is worthwhile to quote Richard D.Crips to identify clearly the scope of Marketing research and market research. “Marketing research is the systematic, objective and exhaustive search for the study of the facts relevant to any problem in the field of marketing. Market research is restricted to the study of actual and potential buyers, their location, their actual and potential value of purchases and their motives and habits.”
Market research may be conducted for the following reasons:
- To identify the present and potential customers and their needs.
- To forecast the demand of a product.
- To determine customers preferences with regard to packaging, design, size, price and other features of a product.
- To locate the demand for products with regard to time and place, such as festival demand.
- To explore new markets for existing products.
Scope of Marketing Research
Marketing research covers different aspects of marketing of goods, services and ideas. There are many areas of marketing management where marketing research has special branches.
Product Research:- Product research is associated with the conversion of customer needs into tangible product offer. This includes development and testing of new products, improving the existing products, and a tab on the changing customer preferences, habits, tastes, etc. Packaging design, branding, and labelling decisions are also included here.
Customer Research:- This research type includes investigation into the customer buying behaviour — the economic, social, cultural, personal and psychological influences.
Sales Research:- Sales research involves decisions concerning selection of store location, channels, territories, sales force motivation and compensation, etc. The purpose is to reach the target customer more effectively, efficiently and timely. .
Promotion Research:- Promotion research encompasses all efforts by the marketers to communicate the company’s offer. This includes advertising, publicity, public relations, sales promotion, etc.
Marketing Research (MR) is the systematic problem analysis, model building and fact finding method for the purpose of improved decision-making, with a view to control the marketing of goods and services.
The American Marketing Association defined MR as the function which links the consumer, customer and public to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems, refine and evaluate marketing actions, monitor marketing performance and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, design the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyses the result and communicates the findings and their implications.
All the above definitions of marketing research emphasize the need for evaluating the problem and information in a more comprehensive and exhaustive manner. You can say that marketing research is a systematic and objective process of identifying and formulating the marketing problems, setting research objectives and methods for collecting, editing, coding, tabulating, evaluating, analyzing, interpreting the data in order to find justified solutions for these problems.
Nature of Marketing Research
- Apart from being systematic and objective in nature, the main characteristic features that characterize the nature of MR are:
- Applied/Problem solving research
- Often based on cost-benefit analysis
- Vital for implementation of marketing concept
- Value of information declines with time
- Dynamic (ongoing)
Marketing research is one of the principal tools for answering questions because it:
- Links the consumer, customer, and public to the market through information used to identify and define marketing.
- Generates, refines, and evaluates marketing actions
- Monitors marketing performance
- Underlines the understanding of marketing as a process
Marketing research is often partitioned into two sets of categorical pairs, either by target market:
- Consumer marketing research, and
- Business-to-business (B2B) marketing research
Or, alternatively, by methodological approach:
- Qualitative marketing research, and
- Quantitative marketing research
Consumer marketing research is a form of applied sociology that concentrates on understanding the preferences, attitudes, and behaviours of consumers in a market-based economy, and it aims to understand the effects and comparative success of marketing campaigns. The field of consumer marketing research as a statistical science was pioneered by Arthur Nielsen with the founding of the ACNielsen Company in 1923.
Thus, marketing research may also be described as the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis, and dissemination of information for the purpose of assisting management in decision making related to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in marketing.
Q.2 What are client ethics and field service ethics? Explain with example.
Q.3 Discuss different types of information applicable in market research and mention their uses.
Q.4 What is SPSS? How does SPSS help in marketing research?
Q.5 Give a note on marketing audit.
Q.6 What do you mean by sales forecasting? Explain the steps involved in it.
-
