Market Research Process

Six-step marketing research process:

• I. Define the problem; a well-defined problem permits the researcher to focus on securing the exact information needed for the solution.

• II. Conduct exploratory research; discover the cause of a specific problem by discussing the problem with informed sources both within outside the firm and by examining data from other information sources. 

• III. Formulate a hypothesis; a tentative explanation for some specific event, a statement about the relationship among variables that carriers clear implications for testing this relationship. 

• IV.  Create a research design; a master plan or model for conducting marketing research, to test the hypothesis and find solutions to marketing problems.

• V. Collect Data; two kinds of data to collect:  
• a. Secondary data, is information from previously published or compiled
• b. Primacy data, refers to information collected for the first time specifically for market research.
• VI.  Interpret and present research data; the final step in the marketing research process is to interpret the findings and present them to decision makers in a format that allows managers to make effective judgments.

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