MARKET RESAERCH
Market research is a form of business research and is generally divided into two categories: consumer market research and business-to-business (B2B) market research, which was previously known as industrial marketing research. Consumer marketing research studies the buying habits of individual people while business-to-business marketing research investigates the markets for products sold by one business to another.
The task of marketing research is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid, and current information. Competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision making require that marketing research provide sound information. Sound decisions are not based on gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.
The role of marketing research in managerial decision making is explained further using the framework of the DECIDE model:
D — Define the marketing problem
E — Enumerate the controllable and uncontrollable decision factors
C — Collect relevant information
I — Identify the best alternative
D — Develop and implement a marketing plan
E — Evaluate the decision and the decision process