No Business can flourish & retain on its ground unless they know their consumers: their likes, their buying behaviour, which product is being a hit or miss in which geographical location.
How else would there be a brand that’s preferred over others?
And that’s why businesses are mostly dependent on market research. Being an important tool of business strategy, it can either make or break a business.
Market research is a technique to gather information on the target consumers. It keeps a track on market size, market need, the surviving & emerging competition. Keeping a track through social & opinion research, market research uses both qualitative as well as quantitative techniques that includes focus groups & customer surveys respectively.
Market Research helps the businesses in determining the customer’s requirement. It also helps them in planning forward with how they are supposed to advertise a certain product. It helps the business in reviewing the situation of their marketed product in accordance with the demand-supply situation.
Market research helps in collecting information about the following fields:
Market information:
Through Market research, businesses have help in determining their product need, worth, the market need, the competition with respect to the specific product.
Market Trends:
Knowing what’s being favoured by the consumers in the particular period of time helps the business with further manufacturing & marketing of the product. A business must be quick enough to figure out what’s trending in the market and how can they meet customer’s requirements so as not to cause any hindrance in it’s growth.
Marketing Efficacy:
Through various ways , market research helps in knowing the effectiveness of a certain product in market. These ways include:
- Keeping a track of your competitors; knowing how well is your particular product doing over the same product of your competitor.
- Keep a tab on the reach of your product through advertisement & how are your consumers responding to it.
- Remembering to be always aware of what is on stake with the certain product & is it worth the risk & if it is, can the loss, if incurred would be small enough to revive back with the minimum strength required to survive in the market.
Market Segmentation:
Market segmentation is dividing the customers not only on the basis of their preferences, but other shared attributes as well like what appeals to whom . consumers necessity, their customs etc.
Creating several segments of a sub-group of consumers on the basis of shared values is market segmentation.It helps in identifying the potential growth rate in the respective market considering all the attributes.B2B & B2C might segment the market on different notes with the former, segmenting on the basis of geographical location & latter looking more into lifestyle segments or need segment.
One such tool for segmenting marketing, keeping in mind , the uprising of Digital era and the use of technology in every field in order to engage targets to survive & develop in the industry is technographic segmentation.
Technographic segmentation makes use of the installed technology like personal computers, smartphones to advertise their product in accordance with the online behaviour of consumer on their specific mode & use of technology. It helps the business with engaging & retaining the target audience and enhances their outreach. The data from various job portals, social sites, public as well as government websites is extracted and segmented to reach the audience.
Technographic segmentation, further divided into Social Media Technographic & Mobile Technographics helps in finding & concentrating on advertising the product to the specific prospective consumers at a faster pace along with examining the retention of consumers.
To sum it up, market research is evolving & hence the businesses have to come up with innovative & creative ways to make their product stand the test of time since the business world is all ‘survival of the fittest’.
