4: Market Research

Market research: a set of techniques and principles for systematically collecting, recording, analyzing and interpreting data that can help marketing decisions.

  • Reduces uncertainty

  • Bridge environment & customers → market intelligence with competitors.

  • Enhance responsiveness

  • Identify emerging opportunities

Use cases

  • Descriptive: what is happening? Snapshot of current situation by describing behaviours, characteristics or market conditions.

  • Diagnostic: why is it happening? Explains reasons behind observed patterns by digging into attitudes, motivations and causes

  • Predictive: what is likely to happen next? Forecast future trends or outcomes, helping managers plan ahead. Applications of statistics and unpredictability.

SWOT Analysis

  • Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Refer to notes from MGMT 2130.

  • Tie to actual data — not subjective and opinionated. Doesn’t provide guidance on actions — only environments.

Market Research Process

  • Define problem: map out all possibilities and pick which issues are related to the problem.

  • Develop research plan

    • Boundary conditions: what limitations are there?

    • Exploratory research via lit review, expert interviews, focus groups and case studies. Provides structure and understand the factors.

    • Conclusive research: perform further research to understand relationships between variables.

  • Collect information & data

    • Sampling: a fraction of the population of interest.

      • Probability samples: every individual in the population has an equal chance of being selected. Randomly pick from student database.

      • Non-probability samples: not everyone has a known or equal chance of being selected. Choose loyal customers.

    • Data Collection

      • Primary data: collected directly for the current purpose. surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations and experiments.

      • Secondary data: collected previously by another source.

  • Analyze and extract insights

    • Raw data is cleaned and interpreted. We build actionable insights, e.g. most frequent visiting times.

  • Turn insights into action plan

    • Translate insights into strategy and tactics, driving clear, customer-focused actions

  • Monitor how actions are performing.

    • Implied cyclical nature of marketing research — implement a control system to monitor outcomes and see if modifications are necessary.