Rios 1
Marketing Intelligence
Manuel Fernando Rios Sanchez Code: 1094914964
Professor Pedro Nel Espinosa
University of Quindio Bachelor in Arts Modern Language
Armenia, October 14th 2012
Rios 2
Choosing Tools to Achieve a Successful Marketing Research.
Many theories and processes have been used to make marketing researches and analysis, but is there one or a mix of some of them the perfect method to make an accurate marketing research? Marketing research is a critical part of marketing intelligence system and it helps to improve the management decision making. At the beginning of the millennium, marketing research was seen as a search of new markets found through surveys, interviews, statistics and observation but nowadays it is more than all those items, it is an issue of intelligence, decision making and reengineering, because talking of innovation in these days is very difficult and only the higher genius can get it. In this essay, I am going to talk about some of the most famous methods used around the globe to research a marketing target and at the end I will bring my personal opinion about the best practice in marketing taking into account the advantages and disadvantages of each of them, the updated situation of globalization and the influence of new technologies in all markets. The objective of this paper is to know a little bit more about the methods and tools to make a marketing research and to take a position for one of them. Marketing research understands the relationship among the customer, the company and the competition using a mix of tools to get the information and the mix of methods to analyze the data.
First of all, we need to understand the concept of marketing and research to know what the purpose of making a marketing research is. The writer David Aaker
Rios 3 in his book Marketing Research explain that marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organization objectives. In other words, it is how a company can satisfy his customers to get a benefit. The next concept is research and it can be defined as the search for knowledge with an open mind; it is the practice of finding facts or verifiable evidence for a larger practical endeavor. In this way, we can say that marketing research is the function that links the consumers, customers, and public to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems, generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions, monitor marketing performance and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
To begin a marketing process we need choose what kind of research we are going to use depending of the problem or situation to examine. Aaker establish in his book three kinds of research. One of them is exploratory research which is used when one is seeking insights into the general nature of a problem, the possible decision alternatives, and relevant variables that need to be considered. Typically, there is little prior knowledge on which to build. The research methods are highly flexible, unstructured, and qualitative, for the researcher begins without firm preconceptions as to what will be found. The absence of structure permits a thorough pursuit of interesting ideas and clues about the problem situation. Another one is descriptive Research that embraces a large proportion of marketing research. The purpose is to provide an accurate snapshot of some aspect of the market environment. And finally we have causal Research that is used when it is necessary to show that one variable causes or determines the values of other variables, a causal research approach must be used. Descriptive research is not sufficient, for all it can show is that two variables are related or associated. Of course, evidence of a relationship or an association is useful; otherwise, we would have no basis for even inferring that causality might be present. To go beyond this inference we must have reasonable proof that one variable preceded the other and
Rios 4 that there were no other causal factors that could have accounted for the relationship.
It is said that information is power and I agree in some part because the information is the prime material to develop an idea which is the real power. According with Professor Smith, the founder of Qualtrics Lab. the solution to most business problems can be found through marketing research, such as how satisfied are customers with a product and service offering? or how will customers react to a decision to change a price or product?. I consider that every manager and decision maker of the companies should know and apply the whole process of marketing research which has the stages of formulating the problem or situation, choosing a research method, data collection and analysis and interpretation. We can put a problem inside a whole research process and we can surely get a good solving of that situation. For example, I can think about how competence can react when I come up with a new product in the market, so I apply the process of marketing research to find answers to my research questions.
Talking about information, there are many tools to get it within a marketing research, some of them need special judgment if they are really useful or not. One of the most famous is the survey, they are low cost and they have the ability of showing graphics, very used in quantitative researching. However, it is a slow process and it has a limited number of answers and they are predetermined, for this reason I consider this method an old-fashioned way to find information unless it can be made via internet in short time and as interactive as possible. Another tool for data collection is observation, which I believe is one of the most sensible and dangerous tool due to the fact of the generalization and the personal perspectives of the observer. It can be applied with the monitoring of many points of view and a lot of time to make accurate facts.
Rios 5 In another hand, we have experimentation which is another tool to take into account in a marketing research and according with Thompson in his book Research in Higher Education it is one of the most expensive ways to get information but in this way is one of the most effective tool to get accurate and innovative facts; the experimentation is the point which brings high quality to our research. We can also find tools like interviews, focal groups, online research and backgrounds which provide a lot of information to triangulate and get conclusions. I agree with tools which provide many data to filter and which ones that can be obtained easily without affecting the customer’s well-being.
After that, it comes the most vital and purposeful part of a marketing research, the analysis of data collected and the conclusions which are reached with some methods to discuss about if they are useful or not. My favorite is triangulation because we can compare and contrast our different results to achieve good enough results. In the book Journal of Marketing Research, Boddewyn says that comparison is an approach concerned with the systematic detection, identification, classification, measurement and interpretation of similarities and differences among phenomena. In the case of marketing we can compare companies, targets, focal groups, tools of data collection, etc. We can also make graphics, statistics, reports and tabulations to get conclusions. I affirm that it is awesome when you can find in this stage the solving of the problem or when you can get an answer to the hypothesis and research questions. The analysis of data is the rewarding of the large process of collecting data and it is when you are most motivated to get results.
In this world, full of information and new technologies, it is important to know about the new tools and strategies to use in a marketing research. For this reason, I concern these as the cheapest and more useful tools to use in this time. In these days, we can buy e-mail lists to send information, surveys and why not interviews
Rios 6 to our customers, we can also use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Blogs to get information before gotten with interviews and observations. Online we can know the likes and dislikes of the market, how is the behavior with new products and prices and of course the web is the best way to upload publicity and information about our products and company. I advocate this concept with Alan Montgomery who establish in his article Applying Quantitative Marketing Techniques to the Internet that a key challenge for practitioners of Internet marketing is to extract value from the huge volume of data that can be collected. These techniques illustrate how this information can be leveraged to create better decisions. We should get advantage of the new technologies of the tools of the web 2.0 and apply them to our business.
As a conclusion, I affirm that we need to choose what the accurate methods tools, analyzing data and new technologies are to achieve a successful answer to a problem or situation in a company. As a marketing researcher we should know the big variety of options that we have and how we can use them. Everything is a process and I can say that there is not one perfect way to solve research questions. I manifest that the only way to get adequate results is mixing methods and taking a sort of tools to reach the objectives. Nowadays, our challenge is not look for information; the challenge is to filter and to choose among a world full of data.
Rios 7
REFERENCES
Smith Scott M. Basic Marketing Research. Qualtrics Labs Inc. 2012 USA
Thompson Fred. Research in Higher Education. The Cost and Value of Marketing Analysis. Volume 10. Springer. 1979. USA
Perner Lars. Marketing Fundamentals, University of Southern California. 2012. USA
Aaker David A.; V. Kumar; Day George. Marketing Research. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001. USA
Boddewyn J. Journal of Marketing Research. A Construct for Comparative Marketing Research. Vol. 3, No. 2. 1966. American Marketing Association. USA