LO1  Identify the reason for conducting marketing research.

To be successful, an organization's offerings and its respective marketing programs must meet the wants and needs of potential customers. Marketing research reduces risk to the organization by providing its marketing managers with the vital information necessary to understand these wants and needs and deliver a meaningful customer experience. They then translate this information into specific marketing actions.

LO2  Describe the five-step marketing research approach that leads to marketing actions.

Marketing researchers and managers engage in a five-step decision-making process about which information to collect to improve their marketing decisions. The first step of the five-step marketing research approach is to define the problem, which requires setting the research objectives and identifying possible marketing actions. The second step is to develop the research plan, which involves specifying the constraints, identifying data needed for marketing decisions, and determining how to collect the data. The third step is to collect the relevant information, which includes considering pertinent secondary data (both internal and external) and primary data (by observing and questioning consumers) as well as using information technology and data mining to trigger marketing actions. The fourth step is to develop findings from the marketing research data collected. This involves analyzing the data and presenting the findings of the research. The fifth and last step of the marketing research process is to take marketing actions, which involves making and implementing the action recommendations and then evaluating the results.

LO3  Explain how secondary and primary data are used in marketing.

Secondary data have already been recorded before the start of the project and consist of two parts: (a) internal secondary data, which originate from within the organization, such as sales reports and customer comments, and (b) external secondary data, which are created by other organizations, such as the U.S. Census Bureau (provides data on the country's population, manufacturers, retailers, and so on) or business and trade publications (provide data on industry trends, market size, etc.). Primary data are collected specifically for the project and are obtained by either observing or questioning people.

LO4  Discuss the uses of observations, questionnaires, panels, and experiments.

Marketing researchers observe people in various ways, such as electronically using Nielsen people meters to measure TV viewing and Internet habits or personally using mystery shoppers or ethnographic techniques. Questionnaires involve asking people questions (a) in person using interviews or focus groups or (b) via a questionnaire using a telephone, fax, print, e-mail, or an Internet survey. Panels involve a sample of consumers or stores that are repeatedly measured through time to see if their behaviors change. Experiments, such as test markets, involve measuring the effect of marketing variables such as price or advertising on sales.

LO5  Explain how information technology and data mining link massive amounts of marketing information to meaningful marketing actions.

Today's marketing managers are often overloaded with data— from internal sales and customer data to external data on TV viewing habits or grocery purchases from the scanner data at checkout counters. This can involve millions of bits of new information generated and obtained each day regarding an organization's sales drivers. Information technology enables this massive amount of marketing data to be stored, accessed, and processed. The resulting databases can be queried using data mining to find statistical relationships useful for marketing decisions and actions.