Impacts of Marketing Research to Marketer According to American Marketing Association, marketing research can be defined as a process that connects customers and end users to marketers through information so that they can understand more about the market. The information used to identify marketing opportunities and problems. Marketing research specifies the information required to solve the issues like designing methods for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyze the results and communicates the findings and their implications.
Marketing research set out the nswer for questions such as ‘How is our market changing? , What are our competitors doing? First of all, marketing research is influencing in decision making by marketers. Marketers make a lot of strategic and tactical decision in the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs. Basically they made decisions about possible opportunities in the market, target market selection, market segmentation and so on.
The decision become complicated when controllable marketing variables of product, promotion and distribution clash with uncontrollable environmental factors such as conomic, political, social and cultural changes, technology. Marketing research helps marketer to link the marketing variables with the environments and consumers by providing relevant and more accurate information through primary and secondary research like quantitative and qualitative research. With accurate information, marketers can make a specific and correct decision in the same time reduce the financial risk attached with investment decisions.
Secondly, marketing research involves analysis of consumer, competitors and market trend data. It enables marketer to assess more accurately about the level of demands for the company’s roducts. Marketing research data provides marketer with customer’s feedback, let marketer know what the customers think about the products range, brand and services. It enables company meets its demand and outperform the competition. For example, information collected from marketing research can create a winning marketing mix to target promotions to reach with different group of consumers or affect the decision on range planning in new stores.
But in the reality, it is unfortunately, we found that there are some drawbacks of marketing research to the company and also the marketers. First of all, marketing research costs a lot of money to conduct several of marketing research. Huge funds required to pay for prepared questionnaire, doing survey, collect data, analyze large amount of information and so on. The numeric data might be biased if the sample size is too small. Some more, the focus group may be skewed if one of the member too prevailing and stop others giving their opinions.
Besides that, asking few people is not enough to get reliable and credible information and figures for the marketing research. Secondly, marketing research is a lengthy and takes time project. It is involves a lot of important steps. All the steps there are critical and marketer can’t avoid one of the steps from that. Normally, marketing research at least takes three or six months to solve the Thirdly, marketer also can’t predict consumer behavior based on the marketing research only.
Although marketing research collects data about consumer behavior, the data collected might be not accurate because marketer can’t predict consumer behavior based on the data that they collected. It keeps on changing due to the time and preference of consumers. This may be influenced by social, family, religious, conomic factors. Fourthly, marketing research provides data to marketer which can be guides and advises marketer in the process of understanding more about the market and the consumers.
The data that collected from marketing research gives marketer a guideline to solve marketing problems such as how to compete with competitors . However, it Just provides suggestions or guideline to marketers but it doesn’t really have solutions for the marketing problems. As a conclusion, I found that there are few advantages of marketing research to marketers, basically it helps arketers to make a specific and predicable decision in the market, it is reduces the financial risk of the company, some more can invest better in the market.
Besides that, marketers use marketing research to get to know about the consumers in the market, they know about customers’ preference through market research, so that they can made changes to the products, somehow like modifying the existing products to better features of new products. Since there are also some drawbacks of marketing research to marketers, I want to highlight that marketing research is costly ffair, to do marketing research, it needs a large amount of money to conduct the process like doing survey and collecting data.
Besides that, I found that to do marketing research is taking quite long times, to conduct the process of market research normally takes three to six months, marketer need to put more effort and time on it. Some more, data that collected during the process of marketing research just provides a guideline to marketers in order to settle the marketing problems, but it is not really provides a solution for them to solve the problems that existed.
