1.1.2

• Marketing research involves the gathering and analysis of research to help support the implementation of marketing strategy.
• The right kind of market research can provide important insights that aid marketing strategy and decision making.
• Market research can provide insights into dimensions of the market, competitor strategies, needs, wants and expectations of customers, market segments, product orientation, and market orientation.
• Having a market orientation is more likely to result in a successful, sustainable business.
• Market orientation is linked to marketing success because markets are becoming more dynamic, customers are becoming more demanding, barriers to market entry are getting lower, and primary market research is more up-to-date and provides more detailed insights into customer views.
• Primary market research is research data that is collected first-hand for a specific research purpose.
• Examples of primary research methods include focus groups, observation, interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and mystery shoppers.
• Advantages of primary market research include being directly focused on research objectives, kept private, tends to be more up-to-date than secondary research, and provides more detailed insights into customer views.
• Disadvantages of primary market research include being time-consuming and often costly to obtain, risk of survey bias, and secondary market research can quickly become out of date.
• Secondary market research uses data that already exists and has been collected by someone else for another purpose.
• Examples of secondary research methods include published market research reports, internal transactional data, Google, official statistics, trade associations, media reports, and competitor materials.
• Advantages of secondary market research include being often free and easy to obtain, providing a good source of market insights, quick to access and use, but disadvantages include being quick to become out of date, not tailored to business needs, and specialist reports can be expensive.
• Quantitative research is concerned with data and addresses research questions such as “how many?” “how often”, “who?”, “when?” and “where?”
• Quantitative research is based on larger samples and is, therefore, more statistically valid.
• Main methods of obtaining quantitative data are the various forms of survey – telephone, postal, face-to-face and online.
• Advantages of quantitative research include data being relatively easy to analyse, numerical data providing insights into relevant trends, and data can be compared with data from other sources.
• Disadvantages of quantitative research include focusing on data rather than explaining why things happen, not explaining the reasons behind numerical trends, and may lack reliability if sample size and method is not valid.
• Qualitative research is based on opinions, attitudes, beliefs and intentions, and aims to understand why customers behave in a certain way or how they may respond to a new product or service.
• Focus groups and interviews are common methods used to collect qualitative data.
• Advantages of qualitative research include being essential for important new product development and launches, focused on understanding customer needs, wants, expectations, providing very useful insights for a business, and can highlight issues that need addressing.
• Disadvantages of qualitative research include being expensive to collect and analyse, based around opinions, and sampling in marketing research involves the gathering of data from a sample of respondents, the results of which should be representative of the population (e.g target market) as a whole.
• Sampling is widely used in marketing research and it can provide statistically valid insights into the profile of the overall population (e.g market) being analysed.
• The capabilities of modern business IT has transformed market research, it is now relatively easy to learn about consumer preferences and buying habits by mining massive sets of quantitative data.
• Complex algorithms can uncover patterns and correlations that enable more effective marketing.
• Market segmentation splits up a market into different types (segments) to enable a business to better target its products to the relevant customers.