The Importance of Marketing Research

The Importance of Marketing Research.

Strategic Marketing Management

BUSI 520

Marketing Research: Concept

        The simplest marketing scheme requires research. A posting in a traditional classified ad would not be effectively placed if the seller did not convey a proper description and fair price.  While this may not touch the scope of global marketing, it does point to the heart of proper research.  The goal of marketing research is to essentially link the buyer to the seller. Marketing firms, however, are not selling a used lawnmower.  The scale and detail of the information involved in global marketing research is in depth and endless.  

        Marketing firms must first understand the product or service that they are representing.  Second, they must obtain information about the perspective consumer, current customer, and most importantly information on what the competition has provided, and where the firm can exploit the rival’s shortcomings. Once the product or service is defined, a plan of action is created, and the methods to obtain the information are laid out.  Every successful firm spends many hours collecting data from surveys, interviews, but most recently the greatest provider of research data has been social media and the internet in general.  This data can be harvested from many sources, and most of the compiled information comes sorted, and is easily resorted based on the needs of the firm.   This allows for a wide range of data across a diverse population to be obtained, and arranged based on the requirements of the research being conducted.  “Just like oil, Big Data is not valuable for what it is, but for what it makes possible” (Verdino, 2013).   Furthermore, the information that has been obtained over years of research has been saved by the research companies and marketing firms that employed them.  This data allows the firm the opportunity to track trends, and learn from the mistakes of the competitors or previous firms.  “For any type of exploratory analysis, the interpretability of results is open to question” (Zinkhan, & Fornell, 1985).  However, no successful company or organization ignores an opportunity to market itself, or research for future marketing.  

        The current consumer would be hard pressed to think of an online purchase that either didn’t request a survey/evaluation, or at least provide a hyperlink to obtain feedback. In fact, this writer just received a survey in an email requesting input about the online registration experience at Liberty University, as soon as the task was complete.  While this may seem like a valiant attempt to provide enhanced customer service, it is also an opportunity to quantify the ease of the online registration experience when marketing to perspective students.