The Importance of Research in business
***Business Marketing Solution!
Research is important in modern business; the study of research over the years had helped many businesses to grow to the peak. Every modern business requires Research and Development department for forecasting early and future business opportunities. The study of research in business helps in advertising, marketing of goods and services. It is important to Research firstly; finding out consumers needs, before venturing into production. Research in marketing and production is also required as it enables the direct flows of goods, services, from the production point to store, ware house for assortments, distribution and marketing for profit. Modern business marketing management is now scientific on these premise; business owners need to establish a research department for effective business marketing, management and development. Marketing Research is important to all whether small scale or big industries either productions services oriented. Research in modern business requires data collection, information, gathering about brands or of company’s products, services performance in the markets. There are two type business research; market and marketing research; market research gives detail report on markets situation analysis and its typography, demography, buying pattern and market size etc. There are two main sources of collecting data in a research process; the primary and secondary source of data. The primary source is data collections in the field; a direct source in which the researcher designs a questionnaire form to serve the public-respondents to collate information; while the secondary data is from already published data, extract from magazines, newspapers, and journal or a research data bank.
Business owners and firm managers need research to solve marketing empirical problems and in setting decisions. Marketing managers make good decision using statistical models for scientific business analysis; to learn more on the relationships within a set of data and their statistical reliability, customer loyalty on brand/services, for marketing, markets segmentation, and product positioning in the markets. Business research helps to examine consumer non-durable goods in the Netherlands markets; the regression analysis gave a model that forecast a brand market share (Bt) base on a predicted market activity.
Bt = -7.85 - 1.45Pt + 0.084At-1 + 1.23Dt
Where Pt =relative price of brand
At -1= Advertising share in the previous periods
Dt = effective store distribution
This helps marketing managers to analyze marketing questions like;
1. What are the variables affecting sales?
2. If price of product is raised to 10% and advertising expenditure at 20% what is the adverse effect?
3. How much should be spent on advertising per year?
4. What marketing predations will customer buy product?
5. What are the variables for segmenting my market and what segment exist?
Marketing information gathering involves collection of mathematical models that helps marketing managers make effective decisions. It helps to experiment; ask and answer empirical business questions on marketing/ markets performance analysis.
Information distribution;
Marketing information gathering from marketing intelligence; and marketing research be distributed to the marketing managers at the right time for effective decision making, planning, implementation and decisions control. The introduction of information technology has made it possible for managers to have direct access to networks of information at all times, example; total sales and individual marketing reports. Evaluation of salesmen and marketer’s performance, brand markets performance, advertising effectiveness on brands and information on competing brands in the markets.
Small businesses;
Marketing research is useful to small business or micro – enterprise organization in a less formal and little expense. Small firms and non-profit groups can set up marketing information system for observing business trend of retailers, observe new business locations, pedestrian traffics and monitor competitor’s brand. Collect advertising information from local media. These enable managers to conduct a comprehensive survey using smaller samples.
Marketing Research Process;
Marketing research process consists of four steps;
1. Define the problems and setting the research objective - the research topic
2. Develop the research plan for data collection
3. Implementing the marketing research by collecting the data
4. Interpreting and reporting the findings collected from the field
The first step is defining the objective of the problems and setting the research objective or the research topic- the problem to be solved; may be explanatory, descriptive or casual. The second step is -Developing the Research plan; the research plan starts from collecting, collation of data from primary source or secondary source of data. The primary data collections calls for choosing a research approach [observation, survey, experiment] choose a contact method [mailing, telephone, personal] design a sample size plan- whom to survey, how many to survey, and how to choose them- research instruments [ questionnaire, mechanical, electronically]. The third step-consists of data interpreting and reporting the findings-further analysis enable marketing managers to apply the information gathered into decisions and provides a statistical procedure, models to develop more findings from the information collected.
The conclusion;
One task of research is to evaluate and estimate demand-total demand on findings or survey; that involves multiplying a base number with successive percentages. In estimation of future brands loyalty/demand, a firm can use one or a combination of several possible forecasting factors, models or methods to determine customers and buyers intentions, sales force opinions, experts opinion, researchers recommendation, issues leading to current markets indications and customers for markets demand data analysis.
‘Business Marketing Solutions’
Veremaco Media Consulting.
