MARKETING RESEARCH AND ITS APPLICATIONS

 INTRODUCTION

As a manager, you are making decisions all the time. It is your responsibility to reduce the risk associated with the decisions which you make. The risk arises because of lack of complete information. Therefore, you are always seeking information to improve the quality of your decision-making. In many areas of management, such as production, finance and personnel, the information required for decision-making is primarily generated within the firm and is easy to collect and analyse. Moreover, in these areas formalised procedures have greatly improved decisions: statistical quality control in  manufacturing, PERT in project scheduling, queuing theory in managing large machinery maintenance programmes, etc. This unit examines marketing research and its sub-elements as they affect marketing activities.

OBJECTIVES
At the end of through this unit, you should be able to:


• explain marketing research

• state the relevance of marketing research in the context of

marketing decisions

• develop an appreciation of the various possible uses and

applications of marketing research
• state the procedure of conducting marketing research

• develop familiarity with the necessary steps needed to complete each stage of the procedure.

MAIN CONTENT

The Context of Marketing Decisions

In the area of marketing, much of the information required for decision- making exists outside the firm e.g. information on why people buy only certain products and not other products; information about the competitor’s next move; information about new government rules and regulations which can affect your working, etc. The marketing manager faces a challenging task in attempting to improve his decision-making. The variables involved in the marketing decisions being external to the firm make collection of information cumbersome and expensive. Since the variables are often qualitative and dynamic in nature, their measurement is also difficult, and the results not always accurate.



Moreover, many of the variables interact with each other in a very complex fashion, which makes it difficult to isolate and measure specific variables. Thus, the pressure on the marketing manager is very strong to correctly choose the most critical decision variables and seek relevant information about them. The wrong choice of (information) variables will not only result in unnecessary expenditure but can also lead the decision-making process astray. The correct identification of variables requires at least a basic understanding of why people behave in the manner in which they do. The manager also needs to monitor what is happening in the marketplace and in the general environment of the firm. The only way the manager can monitor all these is through regular market research.