Use Market Research for:
All of the following marketing activities listed will benefit from in-depth market research, as long as you don’t ignore the data or the evidence.
- Advertising Effectiveness
- Segmentation
- Industry Analysis
- Brand Awareness
- Price Elasticity
- Demand
- Interviewing
- Product Development
- Lead Generation
- Tracking Trends
- Benchmarks
- Forecasting
- Demographics
- Cross Tabs
- Data Collection
- Census Data
- Surveys
- Focus Groups
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
- Employee Surveys
- Reporting
- Customer Satisfaction Analysis
Wow! That’s a long list. By listing the individual components of market research you can clearly see the multitude of steps and variety of approaches. Market Directions can help you make sense of all of this and focus in on what will get you the most reliable results.
Why do marketers ignore evidence? Research findings indicate:
Three reasons why most marketers neglect to harness vast amounts of customer data to create a real impact on their marketing strategies and programs:
Many marketing managers ignore evidence—
relying instead on ideology. The result? Poor-quality decisions that waste time, money and, risks your company’s and your career’s future.
Data arrogance of leading marketing analysts—
Most statistically driven marketers appear unwilling to translate their data findings into understandable insights.
Ugliness of data insights—
Many CMOs and most marketers still believe spreadsheets, rather than graphically appealing visuals, are the natural environment of numbers.
Source: “Big bad data.(CMO Strategy)(marketers negligence in tackling customer data)(Brief article)”, Advertising Age, February 19, 2007.