Market research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy. The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets.
Market research is a key factor to get advantage over competitors. Market research provides important information to identify and analyze the market need, market size and competition.
Market research, which includes social and opinion research, is the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision making.
Market research began to be conceptualized and put into formal practice during the 1920s, as an offshoot of the advertising boom of the Golden Age of radio in the United States. Advertisers began to realize the significance of demographics revealed by sponsorship of different radio programs.
Market research for business/planning
Market research is for discovering what people want, need, or believe. It can also involve discovering how they act. Once that research is completed, it can be used to determine how to market your product. Peter Drucker believed market research to be the quintessence of marketing.
There are two major types of market research. Primary Research sub-divided into Quantitative and Qualitative research and Secondary research. Qualitative works with small sample sizes whereas quantitative with huge sample sizes. While qualitative is mainly theory/observation/perception/idea/opinion/bias driven, quantitative is more statistical in nature and can be used to prove results suing graphs and numerical results.
For starting up a business, there are