With Primary & Secondary, there are commonly two types of research studies came into the spotlight. These are:
- Exploratory: This marketing research collects a lot of open-ended data from a large group of people to understand the opportunity or an issue. The main aim is to gather the personal opinions and perceptions of the people for a particular issue. But the only thing you must aware of “how the markets look or deal with these issues”.
- Specific: Now you are fully clear with the market opportunities, or issues. It’s a time where you put questionnaire rounds to understand the needs of goods or services. Marketing research organization often come up with strategies or questions round to get the feedbacks and reviews of the people about a specific item or services to figure out the demand of the product.
Marketing Research Process
Marketing Research Process is of Six main steps. One should follow all these steps for doing Marketing Research.
1. Problem Defining: The first step of Marketing Research is “Defining the particular problem” for which the research is being conducted. It is advisable that the definition of the problem must be clear and easily understandable. In any case, if you are describing problem ambiguously, then the right decision cannot be concluded. Other than that, there will be more wastage of time, efforts, and resources. Thus, each firm should have questions with itself that what is the reason for marketing research and what will be its scope in the coming years.
2. Research Plan Development: All the relevant information regarding the research objective is accumulated in this step.
- Data Sources: A researcher team collects data from primary or secondary sources to get accurate results. First-hand data is the primary data source which is gathered from self-end. However, the second-hand data is of a secondary source which is collected with the journals, textbooks, journals, newspapers, etc.
- Research approaches: There are different research approaches are being used by entrepreneurs to gather the data.
- Observational Research: This research is gathered by simply collecting data from the current happenings in the competitive market. Plus, you can get information by doing a conversation with the customers too.
- Ethnographic Research: The main purpose of this kind of research is to find the lifestyle of the people. With this, what kinds of goods they are consuming or what services are on trend is analyzed. All these kinds of information are inferred from this research.
- Focus Group Research: In this type of research, a group of 6 to 10 person is formed. They gathered into a room where all of them do a discussion on a topic. There is a moderator who monitors the group discussion efficiently. He is the one who keeps the discussion relevant and information focus.
3. Collect Information: Information collection is a very expensive method of marketing research. Here, the businessman explores every aspect of information to make reliable data report.
4. Analyze the Information: This step is to proceed just after the step of Information collection. Some decision models are also used for the analyzation of the crucial data.
5. Findings Presentation: Whatever the findings accumulated from the marketing research are shown to the CEO, managing directors or board of directors so that they can take the influential step accordingly.
6. Decision Making: Last step of marketing research is decision making. Once senior officials studied the research report, then the time comes to take reliable decisions. However, this step can't be processed until senior management is having full information on the research.