What is Marketing Research? Marketing Research is the gathering and analysis of marketing data in order to provide managers with clear, actionable information that can be applied to business management decisions. Marketing research helps companies make better business decisions by gathering accurate and useful information about:
- Current, former, and potential customers
- Existing and future needs of its customers
- Perceptions of existing and potential products and services
- Qualitative Research - Does not result in numbers or percentages, is not projectable, and includes focus groups and in-depth interviews. Qualitative research is also know as exploratory research and is very open-ended. A qualitative study is usually a very important first step in probing and defining a market. Although actionable insights may be obtained through qualitative research, hypothesis testing and projectable results should be obtained using a quantitative study.
- Quantitative Research - Results in numbers and percentages which are projectable (i.e. statistical tests can be conducted, and assumptions about the "universe" of all respondents can be made based on the answers given by survey respondents) and includes telephone, mail and Internet questionnaires. Quantitative studies include satisfaction studies, positioning studies, and segmentation studies and typically invole multi-item measures, scales, and constructs. PRI has thousands of customizable multi-item measures. Quantitative studies are very closed-ended and are more useful for testing hypothesis than discovering new ones. Quantitative analysis can range in complexity from descriptive statistics and means testing (ANOVAS) to multivariate analysis such as multiple discriminate analysis, cluster analysis, and conjoint studies (trade-off analysis).