Here in the 21st century, whatever our line of business, if we don’t stop for a moment to look at what is happening in the market, what our customers want and what others are doing, our chances of success will plummet.
However good our product or services may be, we can never let our guard down, and for that we have the most important marketing tool of all: market research.
An essential handbook
It is the first area in which a company, whether it sells beer, cars, cigarettes, consultancy services or cheese online, should make a special effort; this will ensure its success in the market in which it operates or wants to operate later on.
Moreover, market research should never be seen as an expense, since we invest in it to avoid surprises in the short and long term. It is also accessible to any kind of company, because sources of information today are countless, and the first source for finding secondary information (already published) is the Internet.
A company starting a business activity has three options: set up an in-house research department within the marketing department; create a department in which to employ and train its own staff from other departments for occasional research needs; or, thirdly, turn to a research institute or a specialist consultancy firm.
Market research companies have evolved so much that hardly any of them simply deliver bare results any more; instead they offer recommendations and strategies to follow based on their previous experience in various sectors, so that the most is made of the information obtained. In the early 1950s in the USA, when marketing was born, it was said that a company was doing marketing when it took the trouble to understand its environment by carrying out market research. It is simply common sense.
The various market studies I have carried out for all kinds of companies, national and local, on products or services, have always helped the companies that commissioned them to maintain their leadership, know their strengths and weaknesses, get to know their competition better, find out what image they convey to their suppliers or customers, and a long list of other questions that market research will always answer for us.
For me, rigour is the most important factor in making the research we carry out 100% effective. Rigour when focusing on the marketing objectives we want to understand, rigour in selecting the sample, in training the interviewers and collecting the information (our raw material), and finally rigour on the part of whoever carries out the study in analysing the results obtained.
Without a good interpretation of that statistical data, we will not get concrete answers to what we want to know. So I encourage you not to trust your instinct, and to use research as far as you can before making decisions of any importance in your business. You have tools to do it quickly, cheaply and easily, such as encuestafacil.com.
Original article published in May 2006 in the newsletter of www.clubdemarketing.com
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