Marketing research is an aid to effective marketing decisions

Marketing research is "the process or set of processes that links the consumers, customers, and end users to the marketer through information — information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, 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, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications."

It is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal of marketing research is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior. The term is commonly interchanged with market research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that market research is concerned specifically with markets, while marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes.

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 behaviors 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

Role of marketing research (MR)

The task of marketing research (MR) is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid, and current information. Competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision making require that marketing research provide sound information. Sound decisions are not based on gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.

The Evolution of Marketing Research (MR)

Marketing research has evolved in the decades since Arthur Nielsen established it as a viable industry, one that would grow hand-in-hand with the B2B and B2C economies. Markets naturally evolve, and since the birth of ACNielsen, when research was mainly conducted by in-person focus groups and pen-and-paper surveys, the rise of the Internet and the proliferation of corporate websites have changed the means by which research is executed

Types of marketing research

Marketing research techniques come in many forms, including:

• Ad Tracking – periodic or continuous in-market research to monitor a brand’s performance using measures such as brand awareness, brand preference, and product usage. (Young, 2005)
• Advertising Research – used to predict copy testing or track the efficacy of advertisements for any medium, measured by the ad’s ability to get attention (measured with AttentionTracking), communicate the message, build the brand’s image, and motivate the consumer to purchase the product or service. (Young, 2005)
• Brand equity research — how favorably do consumers view the brand?
• Brand association research — what do consumers associate with the brand?
• Brand attribute research — what are the key traits that describe the brand promise?
• Brand name testing - what do consumers feel about the names of the products?
• Commercial eye tracking research — examine advertisements, package designs, websites, etc. by analyzing visual behavior of the consumer
• Concept testing - to test the acceptance of a concept by target consumers
• Coolhunting - to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends in areas such as fashion, music, films, television, youth culture and lifestyle
• Buyer decision making process research — to determine what motivates people to buy and what decision-making process they use; over the last decade, Neuromarketing emerged from the convergence of neuroscience and marketing, aiming to understand consumer decision making process
• Copy testing – predicts in-market performance of an ad before it airs by analyzing audience levels of attention, brand linkage, motivation, entertainment, and communication, as well as breaking down the ad’s flow of attention and flow of emotion. (Young, p 213)
• Customer satisfaction research - quantitative or qualitative studies that yields an understanding of a customer's satisfaction with a transaction
• Demand estimation — to determine the approximate level of demand for the product
• Distribution channel audits — to assess distributors’ and retailers’ attitudes toward a product, brand, or company
• Internet strategic intelligence — searching for customer opinions in the Internet: chats, forums, web pages, blogs... where people express freely about their experiences with products, becoming strong opinion formers.
• Marketing effectiveness and analytics — Building models and measuring results to determine the effectiveness of individual marketing activities.
• Mystery consumer or mystery shopping - An employee or representative of the market research firm anonymously contacts a salesperson and indicates he or she is shopping for a product. The shopper then records the entire experience. This method is often used for quality control or for researching competitors' products.
• Positioning research — how does the target market see the brand relative to competitors? - what does the brand stand for?
• Price elasticity testing — to determine how sensitive customers are to price changes
• Sales forecasting — to determine the expected level of sales given the level of demand. With respect to other factors like Advertising expenditure, sales promotion etc.
• Segmentation research - to determine the demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics of potential buyers
• Online panel - a group of individual who accepted to respond to marketing research online
• Store audit — to measure the sales of a product or product line at a statistically selected store sample in order to determine market share, or to determine whether a retail store provides adequate service
• Test marketing — a small-scale product launch used to determine the likely acceptance of the product when it is introduced into a wider market
• Viral Marketing Research - refers to marketing research designed to estimate the probability that specific communications will be transmitted throughout an individual's Social Network. Estimates of Social Networking Potential (SNP) are combined with estimates of selling effectiveness to estimate ROI on specific combinations of messages and media.

All of these forms of marketing research can be classified as either problem-identification research or as problem-solving research.

Commonly used marketing research terms

Market research techniques resemble those used in political polling and social science research. Meta-analysis (also called the Schmidt-Hunter technique) refers to a statistical method of combining data from multiple studies or from several types of studies. Conceptualization means the process of converting vague mental images into definable concepts. Operationalization is the process of converting concepts into specific observable behaviors that a researcher can measure. Precision refers to the exactness of any given measure. Reliability refers to the likelihood that a given operationalized construct will yield the same results if re-measured. Validity refers to the extent to which a measure provides data that captures the meaning of the operationalized construct as defined in the study. It asks, “Are we measuring what we intended to measure?”

• Applied research sets out to prove a specific hypothesis of value to the clients paying for the research. For example, a cigarette company might commission research that attempts to show that cigarettes are good for one's health. Many researchers have ethical misgivings about doing applied research.
• Sugging (from SUG, for "selling under the guise" of market research) forms a sales technique in which sales people pretend to conduct marketing research, but with the real purpose of obtaining buyer motivation and buyer decision-making information to be used in a subsequent sales call.
• Frugging comprises the practice of soliciting funds under the pretense of being a research organization.