Market research provides information, evidence and insight to guide management decision making when formulating plans, determining policy and executing marketing and communication strategies, and is a cost-effective way of finding out what people believe, think, want, need or do. However, whilst market research reduces uncertainty and helps inform decisions and monitor performance, it does not replace managerial judgement and experience.
Market research works because by talking to a relatively small number of people (the sample) you can find out about a far larger number (the universe). However, it only works if the people who are interviewed are a representative subgroup of the total group of interest; and, if the right questions are asked.
It is conducted because an organisation:
In the life of any organisation there are four key stages of policy, communications, product or service development at which research can be useful.
This is a key stage at which research can help inform and guide your decisions. Typically, you may need to find out about a particular audience or customer group, and what their thoughts, feelings and behaviours are around a given subject; you may want to find out about their media consumption, or how the market can be segmented for targeting purposes.
At this stage, research is a useful precursor to strategy development, whether formulating policy, or at the beginning of devising a campaign or media strategy to help communicate a policy. You may know very little about your target audience, and need some insight into how best to reach and motivate them.
This is the second stage at which research can help you. After the basic idea has been developed, it is usually useful to go back to your target audience and test it. The idea may be fairly undeveloped, and need further input to help you take it to a more finished stage; or you may have more than one key idea, and need some guidance on which one to progress.
Research at this stage can help you develop a more finished idea, for instance a leaflet or website, to make any final amendments before it is launched or published. It can be expensive and difficult to make changes to some types of output at this stage (for instance a TV ad) so you need to think about what you will do with the information you may gather here and how it will be used.
It is always useful to conduct research to establish how effectively something is working among the target audience. The kind of information gleaned from this exercise is whether your target audience is aware of any communications vehicle; whether they have remembered and understood the key message; and whether their attitudes have changed and or whether they are likely to change their behaviour as a result of it.
This type of information allows you to assess how effective a project has been, and allows knowledge to be fed into the next stage of the same project or the development cycle for the next project.
Communications in practice
