What are the advantages of Marketing Research?
Marketing research is useful for collecting marketing data for further reference and to take decisions on important marketing issue. Meaning and features of marketing research has been already discussed in the last chapter. In this topic we are going to learn the advantages of marketing research, problems in marketing research and relations between liberalization and marketing research. Though marketing research is useful for various purposes. We face many problems to conduct marketing research. We must take into consideration the problems in marketing research so that research should be done perfectly.
Following are the advantages of Marketing Research activity:
1. Indicator of Current Market Trends
Marketing research provides current affairs related to market trends and makes the business in touch of it. It also offers guidance and help to face market situation. It also makes business updates with the latest invitation and new technologies and changes in sciences.
2. Identifying Customers Needs and Wants
Business much produce such a product which will satisfy consumers needs and wants and for that business man must know the need and wants of consumers as consumers behaviour is always changing. By conducting various surveys and observations, a firm can understand customers likes, dislikes, interests, habits, needs and expectations and thus a businessman can produce such product which will easily get gold to consumers and more and more consumers will attract towards product.
3. Competitive Advantages
By conducting market research, businessman can comes to know the strength and position of competitors. He may also know why consumers attracts toward competitors products, what are the features of competitors products, by making such survey, businessman can make his product superior to competitors products. Accordingly the company may incorporate and improve on such features in its products to gain competitive advantage. Market Research will help to measure the service compared to the competitors. Marketing research shows the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and suggests the proper solution for improving in the right areas.
4. Point Out Drawbacks in Marketing Policy
Marketing research point out the drawbacks in marketing policy such as wrong advertisement media, price factor, product development factor, promotion methods of products, etc. Marketing research also shows the reasons of fewer sales. Thus any drawback in marketing policies can be find out by marketing research. It also gives guidance on different aspects of marketing including product development, branding, packing and advertisement.
5. Effectiveness of Channels of Distribution
Channel of distribution is the important aspect in marketing as channel of distribution delivers goods to the required category of 19 customers in due time at proper place. But channel of distribution may also have some deficiencies so that the product may not deliver at proper time at proper place to consumers and it may increases selling cost of the product. Marketing research helps to find out such deficiencies in channels of distribution and decisions can be taken for improving the effectiveness of the distribution channels.
6. Facilitates Decision Making
Marketing research collects lot of information from internal and external sources that can be used to solve any marketing problem or for future references. Data collection is most important in decision making process as quality of decision taken depends on the available data related to the decision. The ability of marketing research to solve any complicated problem by taking right decisions at right time depends upon the information collected through marketing research. It conducts systematic study of any marketing related problem with respect to cause factors, events responsible etc.
7. Forecasting Sales
Marketing research can be conducted to know the exiting demand for our product and existing sales capacity of the plant. By conducting research business man may comes to know the future demand for our product and forecast the sales requirement and accordingly necessary steps can be taken to increase the sales and sales promotions. Market research will help for better understand the customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to target you customers and fine tune your product or service.
8. Enhancing Goodwill and Reputations
With the help of marketing research, businessman produces such a product which will provide maximum satisfaction to the consumer as it is produced as per consumers needs, wants and likes. By producing such products, consumers get attracted towards the product and thus it increases goodwill and reputation of the firm. Consumers gain terms of good quality, reasonable prices and satisfaction.
9. Suggest Sales Promotion Techniques
Sales promotion techniques are important to increases sales which resulted into the increase in the earnings of company. Marketing research suggest various sales promotion techniques including most convenient channel of distribution, suitable pricing policy for the products and provision of discounts and concession to dealers.
10. Packaging Design
Packaging is very important in marketing of products as packaging protects our products and its quality and at the same time increases sales by attracting more and more consumers. But packaging must be done in right containers and as the requirements of the consumer. Consumers’ demands packaging in variety of forms to right packaging design can be suggested only by marketing research. Through packaging design research, a company may identify the right design required by its target customers.
11. Selection and Improvement of Sales Staff
Sales staff is very important in marketing of products. But these may also have some problems or there may be some staff has no marketing skills and having some deficiencies. Thus the problems of sales staff must be detected through marketing research so that proper precaution can be taken and proper remedial measures can be taken to improve the performance of the sales staff. Marketing research enables to detect any problem with human resource or with techniques employed in marketing relations. Inefficiency of salesman, lack of training, faulty procedures of selection can be detected and rectified by marketing research.
12. Expansion and Development of Business Activities
Through proper marketing research, sales increases and ultimately profit increases it enables the business to grow and expand its operations. A successful business having good marketing technique and good sales for cast can take development project and expand its operations.