Question

Explain the six steps of the marketing research process

Answer 1

• A marketing research process is defined as the collection and interpretation of all the necessary data required for a business decision making process which helps organisations in analysing their needs and requirements and make important decisions.
• An efficient marketing research process usually involves six important steps. They include :

1. Defining the problem :

• In this step, a researcher must analyse the purpose of conducting this research and must analyse the problems that can arise while conducting this research by collecting all the necessary data's and information that define the research problem.

2. Finding approaches to these problems :

• The researches must find various approaches to deal with these problems like preparing questions based on the research being conducted, hypothesis models, conducting case studies etc.

3. Formulating research design :

• Formulation of research design requires collecting all the necessary secondary data's and information, analysing necessary variables and designing a study that can help in detailed analysis of the hypothesis model's by preparing questionnaires and plans.

4. Data collection :

• Data collection step involves collecting the necessary data through mails, personal interviews using telephones, face to face interviews with the customers etc.

5. Data analysis and preparation :

• The data analysis and preparation steps of marketing research involves the analysis of collected data's by answering the prepared questionnaire using this data.
• These data's are then checked and verified for errors and are then encoded and translated in known format to create a final draft or a report.

6. Report preparation and presentation :

• This is the last and the final step of a marketing research which involves the preparation of a report based on the collected and analysed datas.
• The entire collected data is well documented by including all the necessary information.
• Finally this report is presented orally before the whole management team to explain the problem and the solutions that were formulated.