What Is Market Research?

The process of methodically obtaining, recording and then analyzing the data or information about prospective customers, business competitors plus the existing market trend is called Market Research. It is precisely used to design and create an effective and efficient business plan, to project and launch new products or services into the market, to position and fine tune current services or products, or to expand and increase the reach of the existing product or service. Market research sometimes is used to estimate what parts of the population are interested and are most likely to purchase a product or service, after analyzing and studying many variables including gender, age, income level and location.

Market research is almost always either primary or is secondary depending upon the business need. The Primary market research involves an exhaustive testing of variables like focus groups. The activities like surveys, field tests, interviews tailored specifically to that product are conducted to study the product positioning whereas in secondary research, indirect information gleaned from various sources that appears to be relevant to the new or the existing product is used to estimate the product positioning. Some advantages of the secondary research as evident from its generalized methodology as compared to the customized one of the primary research lies in the fact that it is primarily easily accessible and cheap. The obvious disadvantage of a secondary research is that it is often not specific to a product and the research and the data collected is often biased and is difficult to validate.

Market research aims to answer the following questions:

What are the existing market trends? Which way is the market going? Who are the other parties involved with similar products?

What are the views of consumers about products in the marketplace?

What are the prime needs of the market? What are the new business opportunities? How successful are the existing products in meeting the needs of the consumers?

Using Market research companies can collect information regarding new products, existing products and new business opportunities learn how well new items will be received by the consumers. It can also help businesses to learn how the public responds to a similar product before actually launching the product or service. In this way, business can align their product and service lines with the wants and needs of potential consumers. They can halt production of products that are not popular amongst consumers and improve a product that the public shows little interest in, or lower the price as necessary based on market research information.