Marketing Research Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Introduction to Marketing Research

• Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
• Modern marketing thought holds that firms should collaborate with and learn from consumers. A common contemporary practice is crowdsourcing.
• The marketing concept is a business philosophy that the key to achieving organizational goals is being more effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating customer value to chosen target markets.
• A marketing strategy involves selecting a segment of the market as the target market and designing the product/service, price, promotion, and distribution system to meet the wants and needs of consumers within that target market.
• Marketing research is the process of designing, gathering, analyzing, and reporting information that is used to solve a specific marketing problem.
• The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing research as the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information. It is used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor performance; and improve the understanding of marketing as a process.
• Marketing research is a process used by businesses to collect, analyze, and interpret information used to make sound business decisions and manage the business. Market research is a process used to define the size, location, and/or makeup of the market for a product or service.
• Marketing research links the consumer to the marketer by providing information used in making marketing decisions.
• Uses of marketing research include identifying marketing opportunities and problems, generating, refining, and evaluating potential marketing actions, and monitoring marketing performance.
• Some marketing research studies are designed to find out what consumer problems are and to assess the suitability of different proposed methods of resolving those problems.
• Other uses of marketing research include selecting target markets, product research, pricing research, promotion research, and distribution research.
• Monitoring marketing performance includes tracking data collected at point-of-sale terminals as consumer packages goods are scanned in grocery stores, mass-merchandisers, and convenience stores. It also includes tracking social media.
• Basic research expands knowledge, while applied research solves specific problems.
• Most marketing research studies are trying to understand and predict consumer behavior, which is a difficult task.
• A Marketing Information System (MIS) is a structure of people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers.
• Components of an MIS include an internal reports system, marketing intelligence system, marketing decision support system (DSS), and marketing research system.
• The marketing research system gathers information for a specific situation, unlike the other systems in the MIS, and is not continuous; it has a beginning and end.