Business Studies Market plan

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Mithunan Muhunthan

Market Research

The process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a market, about product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the past, present and potential customers for the product or service; research into the characteristics, spending habits, location and needs of your business’s target market, the industry as whole, and the particular competitors you face.

What are the main purposes of market research?

If a business is market orientated then it must find out what people’s demands are and what their competitors are doing.  This is done by using a method commonly used known as Market Research. Market research is mainly used to answer questions like: Who is in the target market, Where are they, what do they want, what are our competitors doing?  The main purposes for market research are to:

  • Find out peoples buying pattern.
  • Find out people taste.
  • Find out peoples demand.
  • Learning about competitors.
  • Peoples opinion about your product – whether people like it or not.

Types of Research

Primary Research

Sometimes also called field research, primary research is undertaken by, or commissioned by, and organisation for a specific purpose. The required information does not all already exist in any available form and so the research has to be undertaken from scratch.

The advantage of primary research is that it is exactly tailored to the problem in hand, but it can be expensive and time consuming to undertake.

Once the researches have recognised that information is needed that is not currently available, they must decide from what source they can most effectively get the information. It is well worth checking secondary data sources first to see what has already been done.

Types of Primary Research

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There are many different ways to gather primary research. These types are detailed below:

Research methods

The three most commonly used methods for collecting primary data are interviews & surveys, observation and experiments.

Interviews and Surveys

This involves the collection of data directly from individuals. This may be by direct face-to-face personal interview, either individually or in a group, by telephone or by mail questionnaire. Each of these techniques considered in turn below as its own set of advantages and disadvantages which are summarised in table 1.

Observational Research

This method involves, as its name implies, the observation ...

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