The Main Steps in Market Research Process

Market Research
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Market Research
A famous new product flop that could be associated with the failure to undertake a proper marketing plan assessment is Google+, Google’s social platform to compete with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Google introduced the network on June 28, 2011, in the market at a time when Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumbler were already popular (Denning, 2015). In its first year of launching, the network attracted several people from the other platforms. The network linked other Google products including Google Drive, Blogger. Despite the company’s efforts to solicit users to adopt it, the consumers were hesitant. Besides, the many users who had adopted the platform did not see any significant progress in its presence and opted to move to the competition. Failure of the platform can be attributed to the company’s poor problem definition process.
Marketing encompasses all the activities that a firm undertakes to make customers purchase the products or services. Consumers, in turn, benefit by purchasing their desired products or services. A successful marketing process involves six key steps: 1) problem definition, 2) approach development, 3) research design formulation, 4) fieldwork or data collection 5) data preparation and analysis, 6) report preparation and presentation. Missing any of these steps could lead to the failure of the marketing plan. Problem definition entails researching to identify the market needs and potential problems that the software may encounter.
Before launching a product, a company should conduct a thorough assessment of the market gap, which culminates into problem definition. This marks the first step in marketing research. The stage involves researching to identify the target market the business desires to focus on. It involves holding discussions with decision-makers, industry experts, consumers, and discussion in focus groups. In this stage, the orga...