Challenges and Advantages of Marketing Research
[ad_1]
Marketing research is a systematic and objective collection, analysis, interpretation of data and communication of marketing information relevant to a particular marketing problem. A company or organization can research about the market before initiating any marketing activity like sales and production to identify niche markets.
Advantages of marketing research
· It indicates opportunities for products and market development, a company can then decide on the production, sales and production plans after identifying the opportunities.
· It provides a basis for sound, market led decision making by providing information to reduce uncertainty.
· Marketing research enables an organist ion to match their products or services to the requirements of the consumers or market.
· Research enables advertising to be tested during a campaigns development or prior to launch to ensure its effectiveness, and after launch to measure the success of the media used.
· It also enables product ideas to be tested without expenditures of lunching to the market; this can be a change in service, product or design.
· It also provides objective explanation for success and failure in the market.
· Marketing research also helps to evaluate the strength and weakness of rivals plus the threats that they may cause to the company.
Problems associated with marketing research
Although marketing research is a good practice for all firms to embark on and indeed many put in a lot of effort, many times things go wrong in the process. Below are some of the reasons why marketing research can fail.
Lack of cash
Financial constants may limit the amount of research activity, leading to erroneous conclusion. Some times research activities are put on hold before they are completed due to lack of funds.
Haste
Many companies and firms attempt to do too much in such a little time, they end up taking shortcuts and some times use out of date secondary data which produces wrong results.
Inappropriate methodology
Research methods can be detected by errors in project design, sampling techniques, lack of understanding by subject and interview bias.
Inexperience in data analysis
Some mangers that are not experienced in analyzing and interpreting research data may only look for the information they want to see from the research data and hence neglect a whole lot of important data.
Wrong information
Some times, some people due to different reasons can give wrong information to the interviewer which will produce wrong results.
Seasonality
There are some products which are only consumed by seasons, making a research about such products in a different season will produce wrong results.
[ad_2]