The Importance of Marketing Research

I would like to discuss about the importance of marketing research in this post. Why is it important? Many scholars say marketing is always “customer oriented.” In other words, marketer provides what the customers need, want. Missing this notion, “Marketing Myopia” will happen in that marketing team. Also, for the companies which have several brands on their own, they have to avoid “Cannibalization” among their own brands under the same market.

In order to know the customer, marketing research should be done accurately.

*Marketing Myopia is the situation of misallocating customers’ need, want. It often happens when marketing is based on company’s interest.

*Cannibalization is the concept that the brands from the same company are taking the same market share each other, and make the brand strategy less effective.

 

How do companies know their customers?

There are a lot of ways to approach customers. However, typically marketers should define their customers first. STP strategy is really helpful in this step.

Segmentation---divide customers into the homogeneous categories.

Targeting--------define the target segment with sufficient volume of customers.

Positioning------compare and estimate the position within the target segment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once marketers know who their target customers are, they now approach to the customers.

Customer Behaviors

In our class, we talked about Focus Group Discussion and Brief Survey. I also put Anthropologic Observation Method.

 

Focus Group Discussion----relatively high cost, needs incentives for participant, deep

Discussion

Brief Survey-----------------easy to do, limited time and questions, literally brief info

Anthropologic Observation---cost depends on the duration, needs observers’ sense

 

I prefer the Anthropologic Observation, because all the insights are from my sense.

Especially for Focus Group Discussion, I doubt people answer from their heart. As the article from one of our classes claims that customers do not know themselves. Therefore, marketers are supposed to extract the core insights from those customers by means of marketing senses.

 

Here is my thought

Generally, I do not completely what people say. I might be a critic against everything. For the case of Focus Group Discussion, I would do it just for the brainstorming, or getting background information of target customers. For brief survey, it is only for demographic information of target customers such as age and family structure.

At the end of marketing research, i.e. conclusion, I tend to take Anthropologic Observation to make insights from those background information above.

I am not sure this cycle will work, since I am not the professional of marketing. However, the class project must be the opportunity to try this process.

*images from
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