Understanding Marketing Research and Its Value to Business

The decision-making process is vital to the success of businesses in any industry. Formulating sound, informed decisions helps companies develop effective strategies to achieve their goals, meet their bottom line, and attain customer satisfaction. The utilization of marketing research is an effective strategy that helps businesses make decisions. According to Philip Kotler, an author, marketing consultant, and professor, “Marketing research is a systematic problem analysis, model building and fact-finding for improved decision-making and control in the marketing of goods and services.” Marketing research is an essential and beneficial process that provides decision-makers, leaders, and managers the right, useful information, and facts they need to efficiently and effectively help the business succeed. 

• Identifying Business Opportunities
  Businesses can utilize data collected from marketing research to determine and connect with their target audience or customers and the appropriate marketing channels to communicate effectively with their customers. For example, businesses can explore areas where most of their customers reside and create campaigns that meet customers’ needs in those surrounding areas.
  
  Businesses can use marketing research data to discover other products and services that customers are inclined to buy to increase their value by creating product bundles.
  
  
• Gaining a Better Understanding of Customers
  Marketing research can ensure the business meets its current and potential customers’ needs over their competitors.

  Marketing research helps businesses understand their customers better to meet their needs, wants, demands, and interests.

  Marketing research enables companies to improve their products that better suit their customer needs. Moreover, it improves customer loyalty.

  It also helps businesses determine the customers’ purchase decision-making process and their influences and motivations.
  
  
• Reduce Risks and Minimizes Losses
  Marketing research allows businesses to test new products and designs before launching to avoid unnecessary or additional expenses from delivering an unfavorable product.
  
  It enables businesses to determine the appropriate market size and the right marketing approach and message to advertise a product that resonates best with their target audience or customers.
  
  Marketing research also enables businesses to develop the right ads to maximize their potential for targeting their intended target audiences in the most impactful manner.
  
  
• Gaining a Competitive Edge
  Marketing research can help businesses stand out and gain a competitive edge over their competitors by providing insight into underserved market segments. It will enable companies to expand their reach to customers they may not have considered.
  
  It can help businesses improve their customer relationships by identifying customer needs that are overlooked and tailoring and marketing their products to satisfy those needs.
  
  Businesses can utilize marketing research to conduct surveys or focus groups to learn more about why customers are not returning for business and repeating sales.

Additionally, businesses can use marketing research to analyze data collected from surveys or focus groups on learning more about customer behaviors, interacting, and connecting with their products and services. They can gain feedback and insight about their customers’ experience with their products to improve the product, make modifications or adjustments to the product features, quality, and increase customer satisfaction and sales. 

For instance, according to Megan Garber in “Instagram Was First Called ‘Burbn’: Yes, after the drink” blog, in 2010, Kevin Systrom, an American entrepreneur and programmer, created Burbn, a location-based iPhone app, that allowed its users to post their plans, check-in at specific locations, earn points for hanging out with friends, and share photos of meet-ups. However, the app was unsuccessful because it had too many features that made it complicated and confusing. As a result, Kevin Systrom decided to improve the app by focusing on how people used it. 

Kevin Systrom collaborated with a programmer, Mike Krieger, and utilized analytics to determine precisely how their customers used Burbn. The data from their research helped them discover that their customers were only using the photo-sharing features to post and share photos, and they were not using the check-in features at all. They utilized the data’s insights to improve the app by focusing on its photo-sharing capabilities, thus enhancing it into a photo-sharing app. 

Systrom and Krieger also used the data from their marketing research to learn more about their competitors, Facebook, and Hipstamatic, which were popular photography apps and looked for opportunities to stand out and get an advantage over their competition. When Systrom and Krieger discovered that Facebook did not have a useful photo-sharing feature, and Hipstamatic was hard to share photos, they took the opportunity to create an app that was easy to use and share photos. They added filters to the app, simplified the photo posting process to three clicks, and released the new version of the app known as Instagram.  

Marketing research is significant to businesses because it helps identify and analyze market needs, competitors, and customers needed to make business decisions. Companies can make better decisions to achieve growth and when they are developing and marketing their products. Marketing research is not only useful; it’s valuable.

Do you like what you read today? Click here to view my prior post about the importance of market share.