Paraphrasing what has been said about street lighting poles, which drunks use to support themselves and not to light their way, we must recognize that it is much better to use market research as a source of light than as a simple decision-making support.
Market orientation requires a deep understanding of the customer and gives rise to a fundamental responsibility of the company, consisting of understanding and predicting the buying behavior of customers.
This in-depth knowledge has the purpose of facilitating the realization of exchanges in the short term, supporting with information the decision-making on product, price, distribution and promotion.
In the long term, it aims to establish brand loyalty, providing information for market segmentation strategies, product differentiation and brand positioning.
And beyond all this, this deep knowledge must be used not only to understand and predict, but to modify the buying behavior of customers in favor of the commercial relationship that you want to develop with them.
The most important quality of a good marketer is that of market insight, conceptually defined as the ability to grasp the true nature of the market through intuitive understanding, in order to serve it successfully.
Operationally, it means doing two things: understanding and serving the customer.
And to understand the client it is necessary to work within a context of personal and business knowledge management, which means:
- Gather relevant data Organize it within a context that translates it into information Value it with a meaning that turns it into knowledge Make value judgments that transform it into wisdom
The data can come from very different sources, from the personal experience of each company executive, especially that derived from their contact with the market, to those produced by formal methods and procedures, such as the reports that are generated during business operation, planning activities and, of course, market research.
In its traditional conception, Market Research seeks to provide information that reduces uncertainty in decision-making. In a limited sense, information is obtained, used, and thrown away.
Most of the time, when the results of a study have been presented in a report, the questions that gave rise to it can be considered to have been answered. The information had a specific use, it supported decision making.
The report is filed in a drawer, data and information are forgotten, knowledge is not used, and wisdom is probably not generated. The money is not lost, since a decision-making is supported, but its maximum benefit is not obtained.
In its broadest conception, Market Research seeks to find meaning in consumer behavior and its great contribution to the practice of marketing must be based on offering management the possibility of modifying purchasing behavior.
The imaginative use of the information from Market Research through models is precisely what opens up this possibility.
In the case of Qualitative Research, or exploratory, we clearly see a meaning-seeking task whose main purpose is to understand buying behavior.
To get the most out of its results, what is needed is to design conceptual models of behavior, like this one that illustrates the process and the variables that influence two decisions of a particular motorist:
The scheme serves both to synthesize the results of the qualitative study that gave rise to it, and to illustrate the decision process before any executive of the company.
And it is especially useful for quantitative market research providers and advertising agencies, as it presents both the basis for developing a descriptive questionnaire and the basis for developing an advertising communication platform.
In the case of Quantitative Research, its task is to obtain information through measurement instruments, converting the meaning to comparable numbers. Its main purpose is the description and quantitative prediction of buying behavior.
Normally, the tabulation of the data and its presentation in the form of frequencies and crosstabulations is more than enough to provide the user with enough information to support them in their decision-making process.
It is the equivalent of adding figures to the previous model, so that we know how many consumers there are who behave in this or that way, how important each decision factor is for them, etc.
However, we must recognize that we now have a database that actually has a potential value much greater than that of only answering separately each of the questions initially posed in the study.
The information that has been obtained from the interviewees and that has been converted to numbers, can have a much greater added value when we analyze not one or two variables at the same time, as in bar graphs and in crosstabulations, but multiple variables at the same time.
Considering three or more questions simultaneously allows finding response dimensions that are common to some of them, while simultaneously considering multiple interviewees allows finding groups of them that have characteristics in common.
The important thing is not the statistical technique itself, but what you want to achieve with it, such as:
- Identification of product evaluation dimensions (Factor) Definition of Market Segments (Cluster) Description of the Customer Profile (AID) Functional relationship between the variables that determine the role of price levels (Conjoint), or Customer Satisfaction (Logit) Relationship between product brands that gives rise to Positioning Maps (Discriminant)
Inspiration to serve the market does not arise spontaneously, but through contact with customers, distributors and competitors. It is essential that a good marketer works with data to translate it into valuable information that helps to understand, describe, predict and modify buying behavior.
