Market and Marketing Research

Abstract

There are many definitions of marketing research and it is probably not worth going through them all here. What would emerge from looking at them is that market and marketing research has three major components:

• 1. Identification and clarification of a perceived problem in such a way that specific information needs are identified

• 2. Creation of a plan based on a construct, which may be a simple model or a hypothesis, which will set up a search process and a subsequent retrieval and ordering of the data produced by the search

• 3. Analysis of the data and application of the results of the analysis of the original problem

We used two words prior to the word research in the chapter heading above — market and marketing; they represent two aspects of the overall field of interest.