Developing a Global Vision through Marketing Research.

Developing a Global Vision through Marketing Research

28/09/2016

The main purpose of market research is to provide information to the management team, so it can have a better judgement and a better understanding of the situation when decision-making is necessary. The information proves to be a very important element for marketing, not only international, but domestic too, since in order to be able to make a decision, the marketer and more specifically, the management team should be well aware of the factors that are involved directly or indirectly in  the main objective of the company.

Market intelligence turns out to be one of the first steps taken by marketing science, since it is the fundamental basis on which plans and strategies will be developed. Therefore, it is important to understand the elements that compose it, and the most common problems the international marketer faces when trying to research the market.

Definition

According to the International Marketing book, “Marketing research is traditionally defined as the systematic gathering, recording, and analyzing of data to provide information useful in marketing decision making (Cateora, Graham & Gilly , 2015).

The big and noticeable difference between domestic and foreign market research is that for foreign research, there are much higher levels of uncertainty, smaller databases of reliable information, reduced willingness of people to answer surveys and a language barrier significantly important that could end up disrupting the process of communication.

The research process

A true marketer should follow the following steps when conducting a research program.

1. Define the research problem and establish research objectives
2. Determine the sources of information to fulfill the research objectives
3. Consider the costs and benefits of the research effort
4. Gather the relevant data from secondary or primary sources.
5. Analyze, interpret, and summarize the results.
6. Effectively communicate the results to decision makers.

Defining the problem

Defining the problem is something that should not be so complicated but in reality tends to be quite confusing for international marketers, because cultural differences and unfamiliar environment often cloud the main research problem. It is important for the problem to be clearly defined in order to begin the investigation with concise objectives.

Use of secondary data

Secondary information is all that has already been collected by someone else and yet can be very useful for our purposes. It is often found in databases, in specialized articles, research papers, official statements, among others.

Secondary information is often readily available to American citizens, so it is a kind of information widely used for creating domestic marketing strategies, however, the international marketer is often confronted with unknown situations in which the lack of information is an everyday issue, since not all countries have structures as organized as the American, for data collection and compilation of statistics.

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