Marketing Research - Types of Marketing Research

Types of Marketing Research

Marketing research techniques come in many forms, including:

• Ad Tracking – periodic or continuous in-market research to monitor a brand’s performance using measures such as brand awareness, brand preference, and product usage. (Young, 2005)
• Advertising Research – used to predict copy testing or track the efficacy of advertisements for any medium, measured by the ad’s ability to get attention (measured with AttentionTracking), communicate the message, build the brand’s image, and motivate the consumer to purchase the product or service. (Young, 2005)
• Brand equity research - how favorably do consumers view the brand?
• Brand association research - what do consumers associate with the brand?
• Brand attribute research - what are the key traits that describe the brand promise?
• Brand name testing - what do consumers feel about the names of the products?
• Commercial eye tracking research - examine advertisements, package designs, websites, etc. by analyzing visual behavior of the consumer
• Concept testing - to test the acceptance of a concept by target consumers
• Coolhunting - to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends in areas such as fashion, music, films, television, youth culture and lifestyle
• Buyer decision making process research - to determine what motivates people to buy and what decision-making process they use; over the last decade, Neuromarketing emerged from the convergence of neuroscience and marketing, aiming to understand consumer decision making process
• Copy testing – predicts in-market performance of an ad before it airs by analyzing audience levels of attention, brand linkage, motivation, entertainment, and communication, as well as breaking down the ad’s flow of attention and flow of emotion. (Young, p 213)
• Customer satisfaction research - quantitative or qualitative studies that yields an understanding of a customer's satisfaction with a transaction
• Demand estimation - to determine the approximate level of demand for the product
• Distribution channel audits - to assess distributors’ and retailers’ attitudes toward a product, brand, or company
• Internet strategic intelligence - searching for customer opinions in the Internet: chats, forums, web pages, blogs... where people express freely about their experiences with products, becoming strong opinion formers.
• Marketing effectiveness and analytics - Building models and measuring results to determine the effectiveness of individual marketing activities.
• Mystery consumer or mystery shopping - An employee or representative of the market research firm anonymously contacts a salesperson and indicates he or she is shopping for a product. The shopper then records the entire experience. This method is often used for quality control or for researching competitors' products.
• Positioning research - how does the target market see the brand relative to competitors? - what does the brand stand for?
• Price elasticity testing - to determine how sensitive customers are to price changes
• Sales forecasting - to determine the expected level of sales given the level of demand. With respect to other factors like Advertising expenditure, sales promotion etc.
• Segmentation research - to determine the demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics of potential buyers
• Online panel - a group of individual who accepted to respond to marketing research online
• Store audit - to measure the sales of a product or product line at a statistically selected store sample in order to determine market share, or to determine whether a retail store provides adequate service
• Test marketing - a small-scale product launch used to determine the likely acceptance of the product when it is introduced into a wider market
• Viral Marketing Research - refers to marketing research designed to estimate the probability that specific communications will be transmitted throughout an individual's Social Network. Estimates of Social Networking Potential (SNP) are combined with estimates of selling effectiveness to estimate ROI on specific combinations of messages and media.

All of these forms of marketing research can be classified as either problem-identification research or as problem-solving research.

There are two main sources of data - primary and secondary. Primary research is conducted from scratch. It is original and collected to solve the problem in hand. Secondary research already exists since it has been collected for other purposes. It is conducted on data published previously and usually by someone else. Secondary research costs far less than primary research, but seldom comes in a form that exactly meets the needs of the researcher.

A similar distinction exists between exploratory research and conclusive research. Exploratory research provides insights into and comprehension of an issue or situation. It should draw definitive conclusions only with extreme caution. Conclusive research draws conclusions: the results of the study can be generalized to the whole population.

Exploratory research is conducted to explore a problem to get some basic idea about the solution at the preliminary stages of research. It may serve as the input to conclusive research. Exploratory research information is collected by focus group interviews, reviewing literature or books, discussing with experts, etc. This is unstructured and qualitative in nature. If a secondary source of data is unable to serve the purpose, a convenience sample of small size can be collected. Conclusive research is conducted to draw some conclusion about the problem. It is essentially, structured and quantitative research, and the output of this research is the input to management information systems (MIS).

Exploratory research is also conducted to simplify the findings of the conclusive or descriptive research, if the findings are very hard to interpret for the marketing managers.