What Is Marketing Research And Why Is It Important? 
A simple introduction to marketing research is that it is the process of determining, equating, acquiring, and disseminating data to maximize business performance.
The type of data that will support your marketing decisions is information about competitors and your target audience, and statistics.
Marketing Research Fuels Better Decision Making
Take a look at the President for example. He doesn’t make important decisions that will determine our country’s fate on a whim. Before making that decision, he will be presented with information and statistics that support it.
With an understanding that information and statistics gathered through marketing research are essential in order for us to maximize our business performance, there are two questions needed to get started:
- What type of information do we need?
- How do we get that data?
This is where the importance of marketing research comes into play.
Why Marketing Research?
As an introduction to marketing research, these 4 bullets are just a starting point and overview of the benefits of this work:
- Identify marketing opportunities and problems
- Generate and refine potential marketing actions
- Monitor and evaluate marketing performance
- Improve marketing as a process
What Kind Of Business Benefits From Marketing Research?
Marketing research is an important process for every serious business. Internally, it is especially important to company executives when it comes time for key decisions to be made on the direction of a company.
Types Of Marketing Research
Here’s a (relatively) quick list of things in which marketing research can take the form of:
Ad tracking, advertising research, brand equity research, brand attribute research, brand name testing, commercial eye tracking research, concept testing, coolhunting, consumer decision making process research, copy testing, customer satisfaction research, demand estimation, distribution channel audits, internet strategic intelligence, marketing effectiveness and analytics, mystery consumer or mystery shopping, positioning research, price elasticity testing, sales forecasting, segmentation research, online panel, store audit, test marketing, and viral marketing research.
Just to name a few.