Market research is one of the tools of marketing often only pulled out when you are about to impart on a significant change of direction. However in today’s climate research has a more important role, that of ensuring your marketing activities are on target, that you retain your existing customers, and that you are not carelessly throwing budgets down the drain.

Market research includes the gathering, recording, analysis and reporting of information. It may be a process that is internal to your company, or it may be external, depending on the type of information that you wish to utilise as part of your marketing communications effort.

Why Research?
Market research is useful for planning your marketing activities. It can help to measure how well your delivery systems are working, find out about regional market characteristics, analyse your target markets, seek opinions or responses on your marketing materials, responses to your web site, and be used as the basis for evaluation and control of marketing activities.

As you refine your marketing activities, you will need more information than you ever did before, information that you can only get by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. According to James Organ, Director of ACA Research, “one of the main reasons companies commission research is to ensure that their gut feel is backed up by real market requirements”.

Market research enables you to learn more about your customers and prospective customers and what their needs are and to answer basic questions such as “who is our customer?” It helps you to work out who is buying your products and services, how you should be promoting them, and when and where you should be doing this.

Recommended Uses for Market Research

Identify Your Target Market
Who are your customers? Are they who you think they are? What is their age, sex, income, job, family situation and so on? What media are they exposed to? How do they prefer to communicate? Do they fit with the profile readers of magazines or people on mailing lists you can use? Do they watch specific TV shows? Do they go to specific shopping malls? Elements such as these need to be researched on country specific bases, especially if you are offering products or services Asia wide. Ultimately, you should be able to segment your target markets into segments or groups for more efficient communication targeting.

Find Out What Your Customers Want
Check with your prospective customers what they are really looking for in your product or service. Research what your competitors are doing in order to differentiate yourself from them. Businesses are increasingly customer driven, and your competitors will be too. Market research helps you stay customer focussed – not product focussed.

Customer Retention
A customer in the hand is worth… well, you know how it goes. Research can help make sure you keep your existing customers, as trying to get new customers becomes exponentially more difficult in bad times. Research customer opinions about your product, distribution, packaging, pricing, advertising, positioning, customer satisfaction and customer retention efforts. “Retention of current customers, including customer satisfaction surveys and performance of customer service channels are key,” says James.

Marketing Communications Effectiveness
Information on the effectiveness of marketing activities can help you make future decisions about how to efficiently allocate your budget and forecast for future marketing communications campaigns. You can do this at different times in the development of your campaign, using concept-testing, pre-testing, post-testing, laboratory testing, field tests as well as physiological responses, recall and recognition measurement.

Identify Which Communication Methods to Use
Is your target market really on the web? Do they drive or go by public transport? Are they white or blue-collar workers? If you can find out this information, you can then find out the most cost-effective ways to communicate with them, and to distribute your products and services to them, e.g. by retail shop front, direct mail or the Internet.

Issues with Research

Cost
Primary research can be very costly. Determine exactly what your information requirements are and limit your market research to specific information where you can.

Time Consuming
Research is time consuming. You need to plan, implement, control and analyse to get the most out of research. According to James, “If you require fast answers due to particular deadline, focus on the key requirements of that decision rather than information that you cannot do anything with”.

Unreliability
Research can never be “exact”; there are many uncontrollable elements involved. You need to be aware of the external influences existing at the time of research which may impact results, for example, if you are monitoring an umbrella promotion, the results would likely be different depending on whether the day was full of sunshine, or full of rain.

Research in Uncertain Times
In order to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing in hard times, research is a must-do activity. As James says “what works is a matter of fact.”

This article is copyright © Penny Young www.takeabreak.com.au
James Organ is a Director of ACA Research and kindly agreed to be interviewed for this article. www.acaresearch.com.au

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