Why do companies use market research?
Posted by Ray Poynter, 30 December 2012 I am currently working on a project for Vision Critical’s University, creating an introduction to market research, which should appear in a month or so. As part of that project, I’d like to share some of my thinking about why companies conduct market research, to see what my peers think, for better, worse, or different? The four main uses of market research, by commercial organisations, in descending order of importance (in terms of spend) are: Monitoring performance, for example ad tracking, brand awareness, viewing figures, usage, customer satisfaction, mystery and shopping. Finding things out, for example the size of a market, current usage patterns, and market opportunities. To test ideas and products, for example ad testing, pack testing, and pricing research. To help create new products, ideas, campaigns etc. Monitoring Monitoring studies tend to be ongoing (as opposed to ad hoc) and they tend to be quantitative. The 2012 ESOMAR Global Market Research report shows this is the largest category of research spend, accounting for between one-third and half of all research dollars (depending on which category you assign some of the items to). As well as large-scale quant trackers, other approaches include […]