Marketing Research Process and
Types of Marketing Research
Definition: A set of
defined stages
through which
marketing
information is
collected.
Marketing Research Process often follows
a general pattern which includes 6
stages:
Defining the research objectives
Planning a research design
Planning a sample
Collecting the data
Analyzing the data
Formulating the conclusions and preparing the report
Research objectives set the purpose
and focus of your research with the
fundamental questions that will be
addressed. Defining your research
objectives means defining what do I
need to investigate and how am I going to
do it? Research objectives are the goals
to be achieved by conducting research.
Considerations for defining the research
objectives:
 Defining
the managerial decision situation:
meaning that careful attention to the
problem definition allows the researcher to
set the proper research objectives. The
researcher needs to be part of planning and
decision making in order to understand
perfectly the problem concerning the
research.
 Exploratory
Research: It helps identify the
decisions that need to be made. It can
progressively narrow the scope of the
research topic and help transform
ambiguous problems into well-defined ones
that yield specific research objectives. After
such exploration the researcher should
know exactly which data to collect during
the formal phases of the project and how to
conduct the project.
Examples
of exploratory
research techniques: Secondary
(historical) data, previous
research, experience survey and
case studies.
 Previous
Research: Researchers should first
investigate previous research to see
whether or not others may have addressed
the same research problems previously.
 Stating
Research Objectives: After
identifying and clarifying the problem, with
or without exploratory research, the
researcher must formally state the research
objectives. The research objectives try to
directly address the decision statement or
statements, as the case may be.
 What
is theory: Theory plays a role in
determining the appropriate research
objectives. A formal, logical explanation
of some events that includes predictions
of how things relate to one another.
 What
is a hypothesis: Hypothesis is a
formal statement explaining some
outcome. A hypothesis is a guess.
Main objectives of the research:
 Review of the scientific knowledge on
health labeling.
 An evaluation of existing warnings on
tobacco packages.
 Review of the scientific evidence on the
health effects of tobacco.
 Development of possible future warning
messages.
 Decision
statement: Should we invest in a
training program to reduce employee
role conflict among our employees.
 Research
Objectives: Determine how
much role conflict influences employee
job satisfaction.
 Hypotheses: Role
conflict is related
positively to job satisfaction.
A research design is a master plan that
specifies the methods and procedures for
collecting and analyzing the needed
information. It provides a framework or
plan of action for the research.
Selection of the basic research method:
Survey (interview or questionnaire),
experiment (laboratory or field),
secondary data and observation.
The appropriate method chosen depends
on:
Objectives
of study
Available
data
sources
Urgency of
decision
Cost of
obtaining
data
 Survey: The
most common method of
generating primary data. It is a research
technique in which a sample is
interviewed in some form or the
behavior of the respondents is observed
and described in some way. Research
investigators may choose to contact
respondents by telephone or mail, on the
internet or in person.
It is argued that there is no single best
research design. The ability to select the
most appropriate research design
develops with experience.
Inexperienced researchers often believe
that a survey methodology is the best
design but a different research method
can offer the same results with a much
lower cost.
 If
you take your first bite of a steak and
conclude that the entire steak needs salt
to taste good, you have just conducted a
sample. Sampling involves any
procedure that draws conclusions based
in measurement of a portion of the
population. In the steak analogy, the first
bite is the sample and the entire steak is
the population.
If
certain statistical procedures are
followed, the result of a good sample
should have the same characteristics
as the population as a whole. Of
course, when errors are made,
samples do not give reliable
estimates of the population.
Questions to ask for the sample:
 “Who is to be sampled?” The answer to this
is the target population.
 “How big should the sample be?” Even
though a larger sample is more precise than
a small one, a proper sample even small
one, can give a reliable measure of the
whole.
 “How to select the sampling units”. Simple
random sampling may be the best known
type.
 Data
gathering is the process of gathering
of collecting information. Surveys require
direct participation by research
respondents by filling questionnaires or
interacting with an interviewer. These are
obtrusive methods.
 Unobtrusive methods are methods in which
research respondents do not have to be
disturbed for data to be gathered (like
observing).
 After
the fieldwork has been completed, the
data must be converted into a format that
will answer the marketing manager’s
question. This is part of the data processing
and analyzing stage. This stage begins with
editing and coding the data. Editing
involves checking the data collection forms
for mistakes, legibility etc. The editing
process corrects problems before the data
are transferred to the computer.
 Coding
means interpreting, categorizing,
recording and transferring the data to the
data storage media.
 The last part of step five is data analysis
which is the application of reasoning to
understand the data that have been
gathered. In its simplest form, analysis
may involve determining consistent
patterns and summarizing the relevant
details revealed in the investigation.
This is the final stage of the research
process, but it is far from the least important.
This stage consists of interpreting the
research results, describing the
implications, and drawing the appropriate
conclusions for managerial decisions. These
conclusions should fulfill the deliverables
promised in the research proposal. It’s also
important that the researcher consider the
varying abilities of people to understand
the research results.
Ad-hoc
Market Research
Ad-hoc research studies focus on specific
Marketing problems. They collect data at one
point in time from one sample of respondents.
Good examples of ad-hoc studies
include:
• Product usage survey
• New product concept tests (where consumers
are asked to trial new brands, product
prototypes etc)
•
Advertising development (how does the
sample of consumers respond to a
specific advertising campaign?
Most TV adverts are researched in this
way)
• Corporate image surveys (often quite
enlightening)
• Customer satisfaction surveys (these can
often turn into continuous research)
 Continuous
Research
Continuous studies interview the same
sample of people, repeatedly. The major
types of continuous research are:
 Consumer
panels
Consumer panels are formed by
recruiting large numbers of households
who provide information on their buying
over time.
 Retail
Audits
 By gaining the cooperation of retail outlets,
sales of brands can be measured (using bar
coded sales data) to track changes in brand
loyalty, market share and effectiveness of
different retail formats.
 Television Viewership / Radio Listening
Panels
 These panels aim to measure Viewer ship or
listening minute by minute.