Outline the 4 steps in the marketing research process.
Marketing research process is the systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data for the purpose of knowledge development and decision making. The reasons and times at which your company or organization might consider performing marketing research varies, but the general purpose of gaining intelligence for decision making remains constant throughout.
1) Defining the problem and setting the research objectives.
A clear statement of the problem is a key to good research. A firm may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing market research, but if it has not correctly identified the problem, those dollars are wasted. Objectives of a research must be laid down as precisely as possible. Objectives are set so that when achieved they provide the necessary information to solve the problem. A good way of setting research objectives is to ask, "What information is needed in order to solve the problem?" The objectives might be to explore the nature of a problem so you may further define it, or perhaps it is to determine how many people will buy your product packaged in a certain way and offered at a certain price. Specificity of objectives would depend on types of research that are:
a) Exploratory research ? It is defined as collecting information in an unstructured and informal way. For example, a restaurant owner may regularly eat at competing restaurants in order to gather information about menu selections, prices and service quality. This approach works well when the marketer doesn't have an understanding of the particular market or the market is new, and it is hard to pinpoint the research direction.
b) Descriptive research ? The f ...