As you sink your teeth into marketing, you will find that you would be using marketing research on a fairly regular basis, hopefully for making more considered decisions.  Every company that I have worked for used/uses marketing research on a regular basis; in fact, some of them actually have a dedicated marketing research team or department.

So what is marketing research?  Definitions abound and here is one from the American Marketing Association: ‘Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer and the public to the marketer through information – information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions.’ Marketing research applies to any phase of marketing and is not restricted to any given type of marketing problem.

You must make a distinction between marketing research and market research; many people, mistakenly, tend to use the two synonymously.  Actually, the two are quite different.

Market research deals specifically with the gathering of information about a market’s size and trends. Marketing research, on the other hand, covers a wider range of activities. While it may involve market research, marketing research is a more general systematic process that can be applied to a variety of marketing problems.

The following visual, adapted from kalyan-city.blogspot.com, brings out the differences between marketing research and market research well:

As you have seen in the previous visual, the scope of marketing research is wide and encompasses the following (adapted from kalyan-city.blogspot.com):

You must also be aware of the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research.

Qualitative research is focussed on getting mainly verbal data rather than measurements.  The sample sizes in qualitative researches are generally small and the aim is to get a holistic picture of a situation.  The researcher could use qualitative techniques like detailed interviews or focus group discussions to get a ‘feel’ from consumers about a particular problem or stimuli.  Qualitative researches are generally exploratory in nature. That is why qualitative researches are usually done at the beginning of projects. The interpretation of data from qualitative researches is generally subjective and depends upon the way the researcher interprets the responses of the people he has interviewed.  Sometimes, researcher biases could contaminate the findings of qualitative research.

In quantitative research, only measurable data is gathered and analyzed. Usually, the marketing guys and the research agency have a pretty good idea of what needs to be found or ratified by quantitative research.

Quantitative research is more objective because the responses (via questionnaires, in most cases) are free from any subjectivity of the research team.  Once the data (in the form of numbers and statistics) is collected, researchers use statistical methods to make sense of the responses.  Unlike qualitative research, quantitative research uses large samples, enough to be statistically significant.

While marketing research has a very important role to play in making marketing decisions, you should be aware of its shortcomings. Perhaps the most obvious problem could be in the research itself. If the research design, the quality of the respondents or the fieldwork is faulty, the findings of the research could be faulty. This could lead you to take decisions that could boomerang on you. Therefore, always make sure that you hire good research agencies to do your research.

Never take marketing research findings as gospel, however rigorous the research process is. I mean, just look at election researches and polls. Despite large sample sizes, many research companies go totally awry with their predictions even at the exit poll stage. I remember that we had developed a television commercial for a brand a few years ago. The commercial was pretty trashy but scored spectacularly in the pre-testing that the agency did. I am not blaming the agency for its findings; what I am saying is that in many cases, the decision making has to be done by you, whatever the findings of the research.

Certainly use marketing research but never, ever become a slave to it. I know of many marketing professionals who will not take the simplest of decisions unless it has been ratified by research.

Some very successful entrepreneurs and executives sneered at marketing research. One of them was the legendary Steve Jobs who believed that customers don’t know what they want. In a 1985 interview with Playboy, he said: “We built [the Mac] for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research.”  Twelve years later, he told Business Week:  “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs may have created Apple based on his own guts and intuition; however, there have been uncountable successes based on the findings of good research.

To sum up, use marketing research because, done well, it can help you make better decisions for your brand and company. However, do remember that business is for the brave; take risky decisions if you strongly believe in them. Using marketing research as a crutch at the drop of a hat could prove counterproductive.

Visual courtesy : https://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/