Market research is one of the varieties of marketing research that studies all aspects of the company's business environment.
The purpose of market research is to create an information and analytical basis for making marketing decisions and thereby reduce the level of uncertainty associated with them.
The result of marketing research is an understanding of competitors' activities, market structure, government decisions in the field of regulation and market promotion, economic trends in the market, research of technical achievements and many other factors that make up the business environment, which allows you to be closer to the consumer, understand and feel his needs and mood.
The objectives of market research:
determine the capacity of the market. Studying the market capacity will help you correctly assess your chances in a given market and avoid unwarranted risks and losses.
determine your market share. The share is already a reality, and it is quite possible to start from it, forming future plans, and then build it up in the future. Market share is an indicator of your company's success.
analyze consumer behavior (demand analysis). This analysis will assess the degree of customer loyalty to the product and the company, answer the question: "Who buys and why?" And, therefore, it will help to establish competitive prices for products, make changes to the product itself, optimize the promotion channels and advertising strategy, that is, adjust all the components of the marketing mix.
Analyze competitors (offer analysis) Knowledge of products and marketing policies of competitors are necessary for a better market orientation and adjustment of your individual pricing and promotion policies that will ensure your victory in the competition.
analyze sales channels That will determine the most effective of them and form a ready-made chain of optimal product movement to the final consumer.
Knowing the capacity of the market and its trends, the firm gets the opportunity to evaluate the prospects of a particular market for itself. It makes no sense to work in a market whose capacity is insignificant compared to the capabilities of the enterprise: the cost of introducing it to the market and working on it may not pay off.
Market research is carried out in two sections:
evaluation of this point in time with the aim of adjusting certain market parameters;
getting values to build a forecast.
Methods of market research. Market research methods are vast. All these methods are applied about a certain situation, to solve certain marketing problems. Methods of data collection during marketing research can be classified into two groups: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative market research is usually identified with various surveys based on the use of closed structured questions, which are answered by a large number of respondents. Characteristic features of such studies are: a well-defined format of the collected data and sources of their receipt, the processing of the collected data is carried out using ordered procedures, mostly quantitative in nature.
Qualitative market research includes collecting, analyzing and interpreting data by observing what people do and say. Observation and conclusions are qualitative in nature and are carried out in non-standardized form.
Data collection for market research. The main methods of collecting primary marketing data are field studies:
poll;
observation;
experiment;
simulation modeling
From the point of view of the organization of the process, there are at least three alternative approaches to data collection:
by the staff of the marketing service,
by a specially created group or with the involvement of companies
specializing in data collection.
The process of gathering information is usually the most expensive stage of research. In addition, with its implementation, a sufficiently large number of errors may occur.
Analysis of market research data begins with the transformation of the source data (introduction to a computer, checking for errors, coding, representation in a matrix form). This allows you to translate a lot of raw data into meaningful information. Next, a statistical analysis is performed (averages, frequencies, regression coefficients and correlations are calculated, trends are analyzed, etc.).