Lucas Beaumont
The shortest definition of the term marketing is “meeting the needs profitably”. According to the American marketing association i.e. AMA, marketing is an organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to the customers and managing the customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
Before getting into any market, every business entity is required to conduct some research about the potential of the market. This process of conducting a market research is known as marketing research. Marketing research is basically a field that helps in understanding the needs of the people by directly communicating with them.
Market research Vs marketing research
In technical terms, marketing research is simply a process that includes systematic gathering, then recording and then finally analyzing the data for various issues related to the marketing of services and products. The term marketing research is commonly interchanged with the term market research; but, experts usually try to draw a distinction between both the terms. According to the experts, market research is basically concerned specifically with the individual markets; on the other hand, marketing research is concerned specifically about the whole process of marketing.
Classification of marketing research
Marketing research can be classified on the basis of two approaches— target market approach and methodological approach. On the basis of target markets, marketing research can be classified into consumer marketing research and business-to-business (B2B) marketing research. On the basis of methodological approach, marketing research can be classified into qualitative marketing research and quantitative marketing research.
Consumer marketing research is simply a type of applied sociology that basically concentrates on the understanding of attitudes, behaviours and preferences of the consumers in some market-based economy, and it also aims to understand the success and effects of the marketing campaigns. The basic field of the consumer marketing research was developed and established as a statistical science by Arthur Nielsen when he founded the AC Nielsen Company in the year 1923.
So, marketing research can also be defined and explained as the systematic identification of objectives, collection and analysis of the data, and dissemination of the information for the purpose of providing assistance to the management in making right decisions related to a particular marketing situation or problem. The ultimate goal of the process of marketing research is to identify various elements of a marketing mix and to assess how the changing of these particular elements impacts on customer behaviour.
International Marketing Research
International Marketing Research also follows the same path as followed by the domestic research. But in international marketing research, there are few extremely specific problems. Actually, the customers present in the international markets may have exactly different cultures, customs and the expectations from a same company. In such cases, secondary information is required to be collected separately from each separate country and then that information will be combined and compared. But, this is very time consuming and it can also be very confusing. The field of international marketing research depends more on the primary data rather than on the secondary data. But, collecting the primary data is very tedious.
