Business - Unit 3: Marketing - Chapter 18: Market Research

Market research

the process of collecting, recording and analysing data about customers, competitors and the market.

Primary research

the collection of first-hand data that is directly related to a firm’s needs.

Secondary research

a collection of data from second-hand sources.

Qualitative research

research into the in-depth motivations behind consumer buying behaviour or opinions.

Quantitative research

research that leads to numerical results that can be statistically analysed.

Focus groups

a group of people who are asked about their attitude towards a product, service, advertisement or new style of packaging.

Sample

the group of people participating in the market research survey selected to represent the overall target market.

Sampling

the process of selecting group of respondents from a larger population.

Sampling bias

when a sample is not a good representation of the whole population, because it is chosen in ways which give some people a greater chance of being selected.

Arithmetic mean

the value calculated by totalling all the results and dividing by the number of results.

Mode

the value that occurs most frequently in a set of data.

Median

the value of the middle item when data has been ordered or ranked. It divides the data into two equal parts.

Range

the difference between the highest and lowest value.

Coding

the process of labelling and organising qualitative data to identify the main themes and the links between them.