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The Marketing Research Proces/Locating and Defining

To maintain the control needed to obtain accurate information, marketers approach marketing research as a process with logical step:
  1. Locating and defining issues or problems, 
  2. designing the research project, 
  3.  collecting data, 
  4. interpreting research findings, and 
  5.  reporting research findings approach to conducting research rather than as a rigid set of rules to be followed in each project. 

In planning research projects, marketers must consider each step carefully and determine how they can best adapt them to resolve the particular issues at hand. 

 Locating and Defining Research Issues or Problems

The first step in launching a research study is issue or problem definition, which focuses on uncovering the nature and boundaries of a situation or question related to marketing strategy or implementation.

 The first sign of a problem is typically a departure from some normal function, such as failure to attain objectives. If a corporation's objective is a 12 percent sales increase and the current marketing strategy resulted in a 6 percent increase, this discrepancy should be analyzed to help guide future marketing strategies. Declining sales, increasing expenses, and decreasing profits also signal problems. Armed with this knowledge, a firm could define a problem as finding a way to adjust for biases stemming from existing customers when gathering data or to develop methods for gathering information to help find new customers. 

Conversely, when an organization experiences a dramatic rise in sales or some other positive event, it may conduct marketing research to discover the reasons and maximize the opportunities stemming from them.

Marketing research often focuses on identifying and defining market opportunities or changes in the environment. When a firm discovers a market opportunity, it may need to conduct research to understand the situation more precisely so that it can craft an appropriate marketing strategy. For example, Cisco saw an opportunity to appeal to a $34 billion market of businesses that wished to engage in collaborative projects. Cisco conducted marketing research to determine that it would take 3 to 5 years to build a good reputation among businesses that use the Internet and want to collaborate online. Cisco also discovered that it needed to customize software utilized by specific users and to avoid introducing products too similar to ones already sold by competitors.' The company can use this information to focus its efforts on specific target markets and to refine its marketing strategy appropriately.


To pin down the specific boundaries of a problem or an issue through research, marketers must define the nature and scope of the situation in a way that requires probing beneath the superficial symptoms. The interaction between the marketing manager and the marketing researcher should yield a clear definition of the research need. Researchers and decision makers should remain in the issue or problem definition stage until they have determined precisely what they want from marketing research and how they will use it. Deciding how to refine a broad, indefinite issue or problem into a precise, researchable statement is a prerequisite for the next step in the research process.

CONCLUSION

In this unit, we observed that Marketing Research is the development, interpretation and communication of decision oriented information, which is used in all phases of the marketing process. Also impact of marketing Research on the strategic development of payless really shown that as a future marketing or business decision maker, you might not have to ever personally design a questionnaire for collecting primary data, but most certainly you will be in a clients, position of determining whether a survey designed for you is good or bad. Therefore one should know about the considerations, preliminary activities, and processes that are undertaken in designing scientific questions.