The Marketing Research Process

2 Pages 562 Words

The marketing research process is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information. Information is 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. The marketing research process specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the methods for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes, and communicates the findings and their implications.
The four steps in this process are :

1). Defining the problem and the research objectives
Before starting the actual research process, marketers must determine the source of the problem, in order to be able to conduct the relevant research and avoid wasting time and money. A proper definition of the problem is the basic step to the whole process. Defining research objectives involves carrying out preliminary research and this includes, exploratory research, descriptive research and causal research. Exploratory research is marketing research to gather preliminary information tat will help define the problem and suggest hypothesis. Descriptive research is marketing research tat describes in a better way marketing problems, situations or markets. Causal research is marketing research to test hypothesis about cause and effect relationships.

2). Developing the research plan to collect the information.
The second step of the marketing research process requires, determining the specific information needed, developing a plan for gathering it efficiently and presenting it to the marketing management. The plan illustrates sources of existing data, and determines what research approach, contact methods, sampling plan, and research instruments will be employed to gather relevant new data. The research approach includes: observa...