Goals of Consumer Market Research
Consumer market research is the systematic collection of data regrading customers’ preferences for actual and potential products / services.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Discuss the various purposes of consumer market research
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Key Points
- The ultimate goal of consumer research is to serve as the voice of the consumer.
- Marketing research focuses on understanding the consumer as a person by focusing on exploring his or her attitudes, needs, motivations, and behavior as it relates to a product or service.
- More broadly, consumer research helps to provide a company with relevant, reliable, valid, and current information or their target buyer.
- The primary goal of consumer market research is to identify, understand, and analyze customers and their needs.
Key Terms
- Market Research: The systematic collection and evaluation of data regarding customers’ preferences for actual and potential products and services.
- Marketing Research: The function that links the consumers, customers, and public to the marketer through information. This information is used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
In the field of marketing, consumer market research can be generally defined as the systematic collection and evaluation of data regrading customers’ preferences for actual and potential products and services. It is also important to note that consumer market research is not directly synonymous with marketing research. Marketing research is actually comprised of both consumer and business-to-business research and examines all aspects of a business environment.
The ultimate goal of consumer research is to serve as the voice of the consumer. This type of research focuses on understanding the consumer as a person by focusing on exploring his or her attitudes, needs, motivations, and behavior as it relates to a product or service. More broadly, consumer research helps provide a company with relevant, reliable, valid, and current information about their target buyer.
Focus Group: Soldiers and family members participate in focus groups.
Consumer market research can serve a variety of purposes including:
- Help companies make better business decisions and gain advantages against the competition
- Help marketing managers or executives make numerous strategic and tactical decisions in the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs
- Remove some of the uncertainty by providing relevant information about the marketing variables, environment, and consumers. In the absence of relevant information, the consumer response to marketing programs cannot be predicted reliably or accurately
- Provide insights that help guide the creation of a business plan, launch a new product or service, optimize existing products and services, and guide expansion into new markets
- Determine which portion of the population will be most likely to purchase a product or service, based on variables such as age, gender, location, and income level
- Reveal characteristics of a target market
- Understand how consumers talk about the products in the market
- Identify which consumer needs are important and whether the needs are being met by current products
For instance, a consumer goods company that wants to develop a new cheese product for the growing Hispanic demographic can use market research. If the consumer market research demonstrates that consumers do in fact have an unsatisfied need for a cheese that could replace the product they are currently consuming in Latin America, the company could go ahead and develop the cheese product.