What is marketing research? What are the methods usually used in conducting market research before starting a business? Here’s the explanation on chromatioideae.com!
To market a product, the first thing you have to do is find out the target market of the product.
You can find out whether a product is accepted or not in the market by conducting marketing research.
By doing this process, you will know the products or services offered, where the products or services are needed, and what kind of product quality consumers need.
In addition, it is also possible to find out how much demand and potential demand, when the demand peaks and when the demand decreases.
What is Marketing Research?
By definition, marketing research or in foreign languages called marketing research is a systematic research activity that starts from formulating problems, research objectives, collecting data and information, processing data and then interpreting research results.
More simply, this activity is carried out to find out what the market demand by consumers and potential consumers wants.
Market research is usually carried out by the marketing division/section.
The marketing management will know what things need to be improved and what marketing strategies are still suitable to seize opportunities.
From here, improvements will be made to evaluate marketing efforts so that marketing performance can be monitored and various problems that arise can be overcome.
Functions of Marketing Research
Market research has four main functions, namely:
- Evaluating. Evaluating marketing programs that have been carried out previously including reviewing brand positioning compared to competitors’ products.
- Understanding. Understanding consumer needs and complaints as one of the insights or inputs that are very important for the company.
- Predicting. When a brand wants to target a new market, this research will always be used as the main reference material for targeting new markets, as well as when the company wants to develop a new marketing strategy.
- Controlling. Looking at data on ongoing marketing activities. The data can include the position of our products in front of consumers, demographics, trends and also the effectiveness of marketing tools used.
Objects in Market Research
The following are some of the things that become objects when conducting market research:
- Price, this object is useful for measuring consumer purchasing power, what price can be an opportunity for goods / services to be purchased and used.
- Product, product research objects can include, product usability, product value, product appearance and also the level of product usability.
- Marketing tools, this topic is used to see how effective the tools used in marketing are.
- Distribution, this object is also used to see the effectiveness of the product distribution flow to consumers.
- Consumers, the object of research that is no less important is consumers. This is used to analyze consumer behavior and needs.
4 Types of Methods in Marketing Research
Marketing research consists of two types, namely, primary research and secondary research.
Primary marketing research is research whose data comes from direct respondents or research objects.
Examples of primary research: research on the number of people who like smartphone A, research on consumer purchasing power.
Meanwhile, secondary marketing research is research when the data has been processed and is ongoing.
This market research aims to evaluate and control ongoing marketing activities.
Examples of secondary research: the number of people who buy goods, the number of people who visit your website.
In addition, some types of research methods or marketing research to find out market conditions are:
Questionnaires
A questionnaire is a marketing research method by providing a form or list of questions needed.
Before conducting research, you need to prepare potential respondents.
Try to select potential customers or prospects as respondents to help you answer the questionnaire questions.
Make sure the respondents you choose are willing to cooperate to fill out the questionnaire correctly and honestly.
If necessary, you can provide gifts, incentives, or mementos as rewards and thanks.
Focus Group Discussion or FGD
The second marketing research method is to create a discussion group.
You can create a group of 15 or more people.
The group contains 1 moderator, 3 researchers, and respondent participants.
The moderator is in charge of directing the discussion, the researchers are in charge of recording and recording their observations of customer responses, reactions, and comments.
Forum group discussions or FGDs can be conducted by taking different groups or groups with similar interests.
Survey
The third marketing research method is surveys. This method is done by asking simple questions about the product/service you are researching.
The selection of respondents is usually done randomly and based on volunteerism. Unlike questionnaires, surveys tend to be shorter than questionnaires.
Nowadays, surveys are very easy to conduct online. Online surveys get faster responses. So if
Observation
This method is more descriptive. Where you directly observe the market situation either observing trends through social media and news outlets.
You can go directly to the market and also observe an event by analyzing cause and effect.