Marketing: Market Research
Uncovering Opportunity & Reducing Risk
Good market research provides the necessary foundation for understanding who your customers are, what they like and dislike, and how best to communicate with them. Greenbaum Marketing Communications provides customer loyalty surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, product positioning surveys, and other marketing research. The result is well-thought recommendations for your marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns.
Indeed, we believe firmly in the use of marketing research to uncover opportunities in the marketplace and reduce marketing risks. We conduct consumer and business-to-business market research to gain critical perspective on product/service differentiation, competition and marketing progress over time. Using surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, data review, and other methods, we tailor our research efforts to gain specific information that substantiates and guides business and marketing decisions.
Marketing research focuses and organizes marketing information. It ensures that such information is timely and permits entrepreneurs to:
- Reduce business risks
- Spot current and upcoming problems in the current market
- Identify sales opportunitiesDevelop plans of action
Market Research - The Process
Step One: Define Marketing Problems and Opportunities
Market research can either be quite simple or very complex. As a result, we approach each new client and each new project with a wide range of questions that investigate the marketing challenges our clients face. Whether we are trying to gauge our clients brand awareness in a specific market segment or merely determine customer satisfaction levels, we spend the necessary time and energy up-front to maintain our focus throughout the process.
Step Two: Set Objectives, Budget and Timetables
Objective: With a marketing problem or opportunity clearly defined, we then set objectives for client market research operations. One objective might be to explore the nature of a problem so we may further define it. Another may be to determine how many people will buy your product packaged in a certain way and offered at a certain price. A third objective might focus on efforts to test possible cause and effect relationships. What ever the objectives may be, you can be assured they will be pointed, practical and profitable.
Budget: Market research is just a portion of your overall marketing budget, so the question becomes: How much money are you willing to invest in market research? One popular method is to allocate a small percentage of gross sales or a percentage of your overall marketing budget. It is common, for example, for companies to spend from 2 - 4% of gross sales on market research.
Timetables: We prepare a detailed time frame and realistic milestones to complete all steps of the market research process. If your business operates in cycles, we take into consideration target dates that will allow the best accessibility to your market.
Timetables: We prepare a detailed time frame and realistic milestones to complete all steps of the market research process. If your business operates in cycles, we take into consideration target dates that will allow the best accessibility to your market.
Step Three: Select Research Types, Methods and Techniques
There are two types of research: primary research where original information is gathered for a specific purpose and secondary research where information that already exists is utilized for analysis. Both types of research have a number of activities and methods associated with them. Secondary research is usually faster and less expensive to obtain than primary research, whereas primary research can bring identifiable value for specific products or services.
Step Four: Design Research Instruments
The most common research instrument is a questionnaire. Here is the process we employ when designing your market research questionnaire.
Keep it simple.
We make sure to include instructions for answering all questions included on the survey, beginning with general questions that lead toward more specific inquiry.
Keep each question brief.
We design the questionnaire to be graphically pleasing and easy to read, keeping questions as brief as possible.
Pre-testing the questionnaire.
Before taking the survey to the printer, we ask a select group of people-such as regular customers, colleagues, friends or employees-to complete the survey. We also ask them for feedback on the survey's style, simplicity and their perception of its purpose.
Mixing the form of the questions.
The way a question is asked may influence the answer given. As a result, we believe that using a variety of question types results in a more meaningful and useful questionnaire, including scales, rankings, open-ended questions and closed-ended questions.
Step Five: Collect Data
To help you obtain clear, unbiased and reliable results, we collect data utilizing very specific practices that are often tailored to each project to maximize accuracy. We train, educate and supervise our research staff on the specifics of your project before we begin collecting the data.
Step Six: Organize and Analyze Data
Once your data has been collected, it needs to be "cleaned." Cleaning research data involves editing, coding and tabulating the results. How simply we have designed your research instrument or questionnaire often dictates how easy this process will be.
Step Seven: Present and Use Marketing Research Findings
Once marketing information about your target market, competition and environment is collected and analyzed, we present it in an organized manner to the decision makers of your business. From there, we use the data collected to guide our marketing strategies and creative development efforts.
