Market Research

ANS> 1. Wal-mart 2. Kroger

ANS>

Well I don't know. But why don't you refer industry magazine/publication or online resources to get the details with facts and figures?

1. Needs, Wants and Demands

The most basic concept here is the human needs, human needs are nothing but state of felt deprivation, this include physical, social and individual needs.

The form which human needs take are called as wants, these are shaped by culture and individual personality, for instance and Indian when he feels hungry he would look for a road side, whereas a person in US would look for a Burger or McDonald.

When a need is backed by buying power it becomes demand.

2. Marketing offering (products, services and Experience:

"

Market offerings are some combination of products, services, information, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or want."

Now, more and more marketers have realized the importance of brand experiences

for consumers. Paying more attention to the specific products than to the benefits and experience produced by these products, marketers or sellers easily suffer from Marketing Myopia.

They are so obsessed with their products that focus only on existing wants and lose sight of underlying customer real

need Marketing Myopia is the mistake of paying more attention to the specific products a company offers than to the benefits and experiences produced by these products.

We always need an oven or something to bake bread but we now really want a user-friendly,

energy-saving,

and inexpensive oven that can be arranged in our kitchen with limited room. We do not like the big oven fueled by gas that used decades ago.
"Smart marketers look beyond the attributes of the products and service they sell.

By orchestrating several services and products, they create brand experiences for consumers.

3. Value and satisfaction

Consumers usually face a broad array of products and services that might satisfy a given need. How do they choose among these many market offerings? Customers form expectations about the value and satisfaction that various market offerings will deliver and buy accordingly. Satisfied customers buy again and tell others about their good experiences. Dissatisfied customers often switch to competitors and disparage the product to others.

Marketers must be careful to set the right level of expectations. If they set expectations too low, they may satisfy those who buy but fail to attract enough buyers. If they set expectations too high, buyers will be disappointed. Customer value and customer satisfaction are key building blocks for developing and managing customer relationships

4. Exchanges and Relationship

Marketing occurs when people decide to satisfy needs and wants through exchange relationships. Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering something in return. In the broadest sense, the marketer tries to bring about a response to some market offering. The response may be more than simply buying or trading products and services.

Marketing consists of actions taken to build and maintain desirable exchange relationships with target audiences involving a product, service, idea, or other object. Beyond simply attracting new customers and creating transactions, companies want to retain customers and grow their businesses. Marketers want to build strong relationships by consistently delivering superior customer value

5. Markets

The concepts of exchange and relationships lead to the concept of a market. A market is the set of actual and potential buyers of a product or service. These buyers share a particular need or want that can be satisfied through exchange relationships.

Marketing means managing markets to bring about profitable customer relationships. However, creating these relationships takes work. Sellers must search for buyers, identify their needs, design good market offerings, set prices for them, promote them, and store and deliver them. Activities such as consumer research, product development, communication, distribution, pricing, and service are core marketing activities.

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Baker.

1)What is the purpose of marketing research

Marketing research can help a business do one or more of the following:

Gain a more detailed understanding of consumers' needs - marketing research can help firms to discover consumers' opinions on a huge range of issues, e.g., views on products' prices, packaging, recent advertising campaigns

Reduce the risk of product/business failure - there is no guarantee that any new idea will be a commercial success, but accurate and up-to-date information on the market can help a business make informed decisions, hopefully leading to products that consumers want in sufficient numbers to achieve commercial success.

Forecast future trends - marketing research can not only provide information regarding the current state of the market but it can also be used to anticipate future customer needs. Firms can then make the necessary adjustments to their product portfolios and levels of output in order to remain successful.

2) Why do businesses need accurate and up-to-date information?

To undertake marketing effectively, businesses need information - information about customer wants, market demand, competition, distribution channels etc. This information needs to be updated regularly because businesses operate in a dynamic environment, characterised by frequent:

Changes in technology - enabling new products and new production processes (e.g. the growth of digital study products like this toolkit which are reducing demand for printed textbooks)

Changes in consumer tastes - meaning that the demand for some products will decline, whilst others will grow more popular (e.g. increased demand for activity-related holidays at the expense of mass-market beach holidays)

Changes in the product ranges of competitors - the introduction of new rival products, or changes in pricing policies can greatly influence the demand for a product (e.g. the introduction of the Microsoft X-Box - which has challenged Sony's PlayStation 2)

Changes in economic conditions - an improvement or worsening of the economic climate will have an impact on incomes on a national or regional level. Different products may be affected differently e.g. luxuries v necessities etc

Research created by non-research companies is more likely to have an ulterior motive. One sign that the quality of research is questionable is when a research report appears to paint a nearly perfect picture of an industry, company or product. In such cases it is highly likely that the main purpose for doing the research is to support promotional efforts and not to produce quality information. Research designed strictly as a promotional piece invariably leads to bias in research design. Such reports often are constructed in ways that, intentionally or unintentionally, contain elements, such as a poorly designed survey questions or a poorly chosen group of respondents, that help sway results in the favor of researcher (e.g., own company) or a group related to the researcher (e.g., members of industry association).

While by itself the answer to this first question is not automatically indicative of poor research, an issue arising here should make the answers to the following questions that much more important

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, communicate the message, build the brand's image, and motivate the consumer to purchase the product or service. (Young, 2005)

YEADS

• Brand equity research - how favorably do consumers view the brand?

• 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 processes research - to determine what motivates people to buy and what decision-making process they use

• 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 of 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 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 behavioral 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 individuals 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.

A company collects primary research by gathering original data. Secondary research 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 manager

Based on questioning:

• Qualitative marketing research - generally used for exploratory purposes - small number of respondents - not generalizable to the whole population - statistical significance and confidence not calculated - examples include focus groups, in-depth interviews, and projective techniques
• Quantitative marketing research - generally used to draw conclusions - tests a specific hypothesis - uses random sampling techniques so as to infer from the sample to the population - involves a large number of respondents - examples include surveys and questionnaires. Techniques include choice modelling, maximum difference preference scaling, and covariance analysis.

the cost of advertising on tv varies on the following

1.it depends on the number of viewers.(more viewers higher will be the cost of advertising).

2. it depends on the time of the day.(during evening it will be costlie where as in the afternoon it will be a bit lesser).

3.it depends on the duration of the ad.(normally paid for every 10sec of the time taken).

4.it varies from one country to the other.

in us it may be from $2000 to $25000 per 10sec

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There are other factors to advertising on TV as well. The first and most important is do you want to advertise Nationally or locally. If you have a product that is available to a large part of the US, then you will contact the network directly to buy a :15, :30 or :60 spot. If you are a local business, you can call the local stations directly to buy airtime. Another factor is the size of the market, if you want to buy a :30 spot in New York, it is going to cost significantly more than a spot in Boise. Spots can be as cheap as $25 for a :30 in a small market, and several thousand dollars in large markets.