Marketing research is the process or set of processes that links the producers, customers, and end users to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.
Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the methods for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyses the results, and communicates the findings and their implications.
Marketing research is often divided into seven different categories:
– Environmental scanning
– Segmentation research
– Target market research
– Positioning research
– Competitive analysis
– Product research
– Customer research
