Marketing management is an important element which determines the success or failure of an organization to a great extent. The dream to become number one fails to turn into reality if the company doesn’t have sound marketing professionals. For a successful business, any organization needs to spot its target audience, identify problem areas, monitor product or service performance, scrutinize marketing behavior, and improve its marketing methods and decisions. A pertinent question that arises here is who takes care of these aspects and how? Well, it’s a marketing research professional that performs such tasks based on systematic scientific methods of quantitative and qualitative research.
Scope of Marketing Research in India
Indian market is essentially a buyer’s market for which understanding customer behavioral trend and analysis is quite important. And, with rising competition in marketing environment, it has become a must for companies to come up with sound decisions; decisions which are not the result of any instinctive feeling, intuition or bias, but concrete and sound information gathered from analyzed data.
And, this reminds us of Arthur Conan Doyle who once said “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts”. For marketing managers, this is the gospel truth. Marketing professionals are the indispensable part of tactical and strategic decision making. They need to identify customers and fulfill their needs.
The data that is collected in the process of marketing research helps managers find out their target audience and segmentation, plan and execute marketing strategies and measure the performance of their products and services. In addition, based on the market research data, managers connect the different marketing variables such as services, pricing, promotion and distribution with the customers and their environment. Without the help of a marketing research team, these tasks cannot be performed. At least, you cannot be certain about the accuracy, reliability and relevancy of the generated reports.