The Marketing Research Process

Paritosh Choudhary

The Marketing Research Process: 11 Steps

• Step One: Establishing the Need for Marketing Research

• Step Two: Defining the Problem• Step Three: Establishing Research Objectives• Step Four: Determining Research Design• Step Five: Identifying Information Types and

Sources• Step Six: Determining Methods of Accessing

Data

The Marketing Research Process: 11 Steps cont…

• Step Seven: Designing Data Collection Forms• Step Eight: Determining Sample Plan and Size• Step Nine: Collecting Data• Step Ten: Analyzing Data• Step Eleven: Preparing and Presenting the Final

Research Report

The Marketing Research ProcessStep One: Establish the Need for Marketing

Research

• When Marketing Research is not needed• The information is already available• Decisions need to be made now• You can’t afford research• Costs outweigh the value of the research

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Two: Define the Problem

• The most important step in the marketing research process is defining the problem.

• What is your team’s problem?

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Three: Establish Research Objectives

• What information is needed in order to solve the problem?• Primary• Secondary• Both

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Four: Determine Research Design

• Exploratory Research: collecting information in an unstructured and informal manner

• Descriptive Research: refers to a set of methods and procedures describing marketing variables

• Causal Research (experiments and other approaches): allows isolation of causes and effects via use of experiment or surveys.

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Five: Identify Information Types and

Sources

• Secondary Data: information that has been collected for some other purpose other than the research at hand

• Primary Data: information that has been gathered specifically for the research objectives at hand

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Six: Determine Methods of Accessing

Data

• Secondary Data: accessing data through sources such as the Internet and library

• Primary Data: collecting data through methods such as telephone, mail, online, and face-to-face (quantitative) and observation studies and focus groups (qualitative)

• Both are excellent! Use both in your projects!

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Seven: Design Data Collection Forms

• The design of the data collection form that is used to ask or observe and record information in marketing research projects is critical to the success of the project. It is easy to write a set of questions but very difficult to construct a questionnaire.• Questionnaires• Observation Studies

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Eight: Determine Sample Plan and

Size

• Sample plan: refers to the process used to select units from the population to be included in the sample

• Sample size: refers to determining how many elements of the population should be included in the sample

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Nine: Collect Data

• Data collection is very important because, regardless of the data analysis methods used, data analysis cannot “fix” bad data. 12

Nonsampling errors may occur during data collection. These are related to poor design and/or execution of the data gathering.

• Sampling errors may occur based purely on chance

• Trying to make a decision on a population from a sample

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Ten: Analyze Data

• Data analysis: involves entering data into computer files, inspecting data for errors, and running tabulations and various statistical tests

• Data cleaning: process by which raw data are checked to verify that the data have been correctly input from the data collection form to the computer software program

The Marketing Research ProcessStep Eleven: Prepare and Present the Final

Research Report

• The last step is one of the most important phases of marketing research.

• Its importance cannot be overstated because it is the report, or its presentation, that properly communicates the results to the client.