Conducting and Using Marketing Research

Historically, managers have devoted most of their attention to managing their products, their money, and their people, while paying less attention to another of the organization’s critical resources: information. The need for marketing research information is greater now than at any time in the past. Said economist Joseph Steiglitz, “What you measure affects what you do. If you measure the right thing, you do the right thing.”1 As marketing segmentation strategies become more sophisticated, segments become smaller, and people expect increasingly individualized service, organizations need to learn more about the needs and wants of their various target markets. Also, as consumers have become more selective and demanding in their buying behavior, sellers find it harder to predict buyers’ responses to different features, benefits, packaging options, and other attributes unless they turn to marketing research. This need for information has grown over recent years with the emergence of sophisticated technologies that have revolutionized information handling and have made it accessible to and inexpensive for even the smallest organizations.