Marketing research
Marketing research is the research that companies do to study consumers and other companies. Marketing research seeks to understand the best ways to connect a consumer and a product, with the hopes that the consumer will buy. This involved evaluating the current marketing already being done for that product, or similar products that are created by the same company, and determining how well the marketing campaigns are working. This also involves studying the marketing techniques of other companies.
Marketers begin research with a problem or a question. They don't approach research with the goal to learn more about a particular market. Instead, they want to know why a particular market is doing well, or why it is falling and what can be done to change that. They may also want to know why consumers are not buying some products, but gladly purchasing similar products. Research is then done to answer the question, and that answer can be turned into a marketing technique that may get better results.
There are two types of marketing research. The first is consumer market research. The goal is to study the purchasing habits of consumers. This can be done by tallying up how much of a product is sold, through surveys or through other means. The information gathered from consumers can be used to analyze current marketing campaigns and to create new ones.
The second type of marketing research is business to business (B2B) research, which studies how businesses sell products and services to other businesses. For example, Company A sells computer equipment to companies B and C. Someone may be interested in seeing how companies B and C found out about the equipment, how company A marketed its product and how good the market for that product is.
Marketing research is not the same as market research. Marketing research studies how and why consumers and