You remember Sally, don’t you? Now, how does Sally know who will want to buy her juice?
Sally must visit the locations where she wants to sell. She must make contact with the people to whom she wants sell. When she makes contact, she must find out if these people are already buying juice from somewhere else. If the people are not buying any juice, Sally should find out why. Maybe they do not want or need juice, or maybe they want and need juice, but nobody is selling it. Which one of these would be a good market, and why?
If people are already buying juice, Sally should talk with them. She should find out how easily they can buy juice and if they are happy with what they are buying now. If they say they have difficulties buying juice, they have a problem. If they say that they are not happy with the juice they are buying, they have a problem. Maybe Sally can help them to buy juice more easily or sell them better juice and make them happy.
Sally should also make contact with other businesspersons and ask about how their business is going. Sally should talk with the people who are engaged in the development of society and the local business environment. She should make use of every opportunity to talk to different people. That is how she will learn a lot of useful details about her market. She can use those details in marketing her business.
Types of marketing research:
1. Promotion and advertising research
You can collect information about the effectiveness of your promotions and ads before or after they launched by measuring the following:
a. Customer response to your promotional plans.
b. Effectiveness of previous promotion techniques by analyzing sales results.
If these ads prove useful, you can ask them to achieve the goal, but if not so, it is better to look for alternatives to avoid losing money in advertising campaigns that may fail.
Benefits of advertisement and promotion research:
1. Increase efficiency of advertising campaigns,
2. Avoid unjustified spending,
3. Determine the efficiency of achieving goals,
4. Results of this research can be used to know information about customers or target market.
2. Customer Satisfaction Research
The research you do to define how much customers are satisfied with the quality of your products and the efficiency of customer service. This is done by:
1. Informal conversations by talking to your employees or looking at staff performance cards.
2. Questionnaires directed to your former and current customers.
3. Research of Decision-making by Customer:
Through this type of study you can identify what will motivate the consumer for purchase and how he makes the purchase decision. You can reach the desired results through:
1. Your own and field surveys,
2. The results of field surveys that you make through various researches would guide you to the method of making the purchase decision by the customers.
4. Concept Test (Value):
You can also test customers' acceptance of your ideas and findings by:
1. Using field surveys to see if your customers or potential customers find your product useful.
2. Make group or individual interviews with customers to understand their response to your ideas and products.
5. Product Position Research:
By this type of research, you can know your customers' opinion of your products and services compared to what your competitors offer by:
1. Sales indicators for each category you target,
2. The behaviour and trends of individuals within the target groups.
6. Brand testing
You can test the ongoing brand by knowing your customer's opinion thereof and product names by doing the following:
1. Collective interviews and field surveys to test customers' emotional responses to brand,
2. Use pre-packaged brand researches to learn about your brand's effectiveness.
7. Pricing testing
You can see how sensitive your customers are to changes in prices using equations that measure revenues (result of multiplying number of goods you have sold per commodity price per product). This research will tell you if your sales have increased or decreased after you have changed the price. Whether demand for your products increased or not.
Marketing research can be made through a variety of techniques, including:
1. Surveys,
2. Study groups,
3. Personal interviews,
4. Remark, and
5. Field attempts.