Applications of Marketing Research. MBA Marketing study material.

Marketing Research plays a significant role where the organization and people associates to each other through the process of data collection and data analysis to identify the scope of the market for product or services. Applications of marketing research is an instinctual interface which provides statistical or graphical practices for market research analysis. It does not only help to identify the target market but focuses on evaluating choices and preferences of potential consumers.

Application of Marketing Research Process:

·         Product Research:

Product research usually conducts to calculating possible acceptance of a new product, upgrade or additions to existing products, making wise decisions on product packaging and determining product acceptability over market competition. Product research mainly focuses on how customers might react to a product.

·         Pricing Research:

Pricing research is dealing with the decisions on pricing strategies of a product according to the cost of production and profit margin for the organization. It helps to determine the acceptability of price of product or services where consumers feel that it is worth to pay for it. It makes you understand the variety of price level as per the competitive market to achieve desired profit.

·         Concept Testing:

Concept testing comprises of assessing new product concept, brand names, advertising concept etc. It basically focuses on the process of generating a new product and its concept behind developing it with pricing concept, ad appeals, and positioning.

·         Positioning Research:

Positioning Research covers all the study of how the existing product or services has been positioned in the competitive marketplace and how to launch and presenting a new product in the potential market. This research helps to define the consumer’s responses or reviews about the product or services so that organization can find out the scope for its positioning.  

·         Advertising Research:

It consists a set of decisions on advertising a product or services, ads developments or advertising campaigns to find out the scope where the organization can apply advertising practices to influence the customers. An organization often conducts a campaign in advertising research to find out whether it is really beneficial to invest in advertising platform for its product and if it's beneficial then this research helps to find out from how many ways the organization can invest to achieve its advertising goals.

·         Market Segmentation:

A market segment is a research process of dividing a market into sub-categories according to the special characteristics. It is normally divided potential consumers into segments by looking at features such as shared needs, common interests or similar lifestyles. This research helps to recognize the high yield segment or profitable segment of the market.

·         Branding Research:

In this type of research, an organization makes an opinion about the product value by reviewing the consumer’s statements on the product. Branding is what are the opinions of people about the product and, what people think about the organization. It assists with the creation, development, and ongoing management and strengthening of brands. Branding research conducts to understand the landscape and develop a launch strategy in the competitive market.

·         Sales Analysis:

Sales Analysis is a research to conduct and analyze the customer records and other available data to identify the sales opportunities in the market. Sales research also analyze whether the sales presentation is effectively moving over the competition in market or not. It helps to record and calculate percentage of sales, stock inventory sales force and other sales related activities.

Applications of marketing research demand the forecasting of the studies in every area such as product, sales, price, advertising etc. which has explained in above process.

Marketing Research and Its types. MBA marketing study material

Undoubtedly hard topic for MBA marketing students, this blog comprises meaning of marketing research and its types/methodologies.

Marketing Research:

Marketing research is a set of a systematic process of investigating, collect, analyze the information which links to producers, customers, end users, competitors to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems and refine marketing action accordingly.

In short, marketing research is a process of collecting information to refine decisions to solve marketing problems.

The process often concentrates on understanding the “Customer” (purchasers, consumers, influencers), the “Company” (product, promotion, pricing, service, sales), and can also be stretched to the situation to include “Competitors” (how their market offerings interact in the market environs).

1. Primary/ Qualitative/ Exploratory marketing research process:

It also is known as field research. This is the firsthand gathering of new data from a primary source such as survey, interviews, newsroom etc. to directing analysis. Primary research helps the organization to know the customers need or what customers want and what the problem is. But this method of research is only to show the problems instead of how to solve it and it’s comparatively expensive than others. Let’s check out its types:

 Focus group: It is a process of producing a qualitative data from specific target audience (most often 5 to 10 in person) by essentially learning their feeling and views about product and company.

One-to-one Interviews: As the name itself this method is used for collecting and analyzing data by interviewing each consumer one by one.

Survey: In this process, company form a questioner and taking a survey of the market by asking questions. It can be done through phone calls or internet. 

Test Market: A test market is a group of individuals or sample size used in marketing research to represent a larger target audience.



2. Secondary/ Quantitative/ Descriptive marketing research process:

It also is known as Desk Research. It is a process of using and analyzing the data or information which is already collected and stored by someone else. Here someone else can be government statistics, publications, private research firm etc. This process is comparatively useful to quickly understand the problem with a solution to it. It may appear in following forms:

Sales data: This is an easily accessible source of collecting data which is available in the company itself. This will help not only to analyze profit and target segment but to discover a market trend.

Government publications and statistics: There are many publication or books, government legal websites and statistics are available where a company can find readymade data for their marketing research.

Commercial Organisations: Company can buy a data and information by establishing market research organization such as Mintel and IBISWorld to help to improve marketing research.

3. Causal Research:

It also is known as Experimental marketing research. This method is based on cause-effect relationship. It focuses on “If…Then...” phrases in which company is trying to solve the problem by analyzing the effect of manipulation independent variable on the dependent variable. In short, it’s an experimental technique to overcome the problem.