Marketing Research: to Be or not to Be
Marketing and advertising are integral parts of any business ensuring not only better knowledge of the clients, but also the steps required to clarify clients’ wishes and preferences. The same is true for marketing researches. Nevertheless, lots of the companies prefer to abstain from various analysis and researches limiting their success by the chance. Such strategy is absolutely wrong – the reasons and explanations of that are given below.
Marketing Research: What’s That
If to abstain from vast definitions, one can say that marketing research means collection and further analysis of information being interesting for you and your company. For example, high-quality research may help you to determine the level of competitiveness of the products or clients’ satisfaction, to assess efficiency of advertising or company’s share on the market, etc.
You will agree that this information is more than useful; it helps to select successful business development policy. In addition, there are the stages of company’s operation when marketing research is not just desirable. It is ultimately needed.
Such stages include:
• Entry on the new markets;
• Product range expansion;
• Re-branding;
• Determination of price for product or service;
• Determination of the most efficient sales channels, etc.
Marketing Research: Why Do We Need
It Everything is clear. Marketing research is performed in order to avoid loss by the company of touch with reality, to ensure manufacture of products or services which are really needed on the market. In case of absence of any research it is rather difficult to understand what happens in this or that business sector, how competitors behave and what the clients are ready to pay for.
It is worth to conduct researches 3-4 times a year. High-quality, professionally prepared information helps the company’s top-manager to be well informed, to assess strong and weak points and to develop those directions which require additional attention.
Marketing researches are extremely helpful in case when the company registers decrease of sales for unknown reasons. It is better to get the definite values than to try to guess why the consumers stopped to buy or order the products.
Marketing Research: Dark Side of the Moon
Marketing research is very useful tool, nevertheless, it may appear rather costly. The costs for marketing research may be planned in structure of total cost estimate of the marketing budget and calculated depending on the per cent of revenue or own capital which is possible to be allocated by the company for market research. Competitive approach, i.e. research of advertising campaigns and costs of competitors, may also be helpful.
It should be taken in consideration that, despite medium and high prices, marketing research payback period is rather short because of the possibility to adjust the strategy of company’s operation and to improve its tactics in area of communications and attraction of the new clients.
In addition, there is no opinion that marketing research should be anyhow extremely expensive. For example, in order to research the clients’ attitude, it is possible to make a series of calls and to communicate with certain consumers from the focus group, or with the users who refused from your services during the last several months. This method does not require huge investments but will bring the helpful result. In context of marketing research each company has to decide - to be or not to be. Nevertheless, please, remember that the correct use of promotion tools and methods will save the company from downfall and usual secondary roles on the market. This decision is to be taken by you.
