Getting to Know Business Research Methods

Fundamental challenges faced by every business include ensuring the smooth running of the business, while managing the competitiveness by keeping the need gaps in the market. All these requirements can be fulfilled by performing thorough research studies in the market.

There are several research methodologies available for conducting market research. The standard steps in this activity include evaluating the market conditions, searching the available literature, talking with a large number of people, focus group, conducting personal interviews, conducting telephone surveys, surveying using mail, email and internet surveys.

Choosing the method mainly depends on the type of data required by the organization and also depends on the allocated budget to do research to understand the prevailing conditions in the market. Based on these research methods, key decisions pertaining to the organization can be taken as these are helpful to develop business insights in an organization. These type of decisions will be based mainly on the number of customers who are willing to buy the products or services offered by organization, consumers who are consistently sticking to the product, current usage of their product, potential market rate of the product etc.

The most common research methods include quantitative surveys, which allows together a vast amount of data in a short period of time relatively spending a low amount of expenditure. It is mainly done to understand how many potential customers are interested in buying your product i.e. the numerical quantity of customers is identified in the market which helps us to understand the size of the market.

Secondly, business research method includes targeting small focus groups. These groups usually contain people who fit the profile of organizations target market. Discussions can be made within these groups to get more detailed information about product or service and making these discussions with the focus groups advantageous to the organization. Valuable insights can be gained from these groups in this way and help to navigate the wealth of business information.

Others include organizing qualitative research interviews with the customers one-on-one to understand the user’s point of view about the product or service and more specific questions can be raised to get a deeper understanding of their views. The interviewer should be able to understand the customer’s point of view rather than taking biased decisions.

Using case studies helps organizations to get more understanding of the customer’s usage of the product or service, gives a complete understanding of customer’s satisfaction and provides useful insight to the organization to give a good competition to the competitors in the market. It also discloses the information about the product that the customers are looking for within the market.

Telephonic surveys from large groups of people can be done in a quicker way than both quantitative and qualitative methods. It usually involves interviewing customers on a telephonic conversation and gathering the information.

Surveying using mail is the cost effective method and can be reached an even larger number of people. But it usually depends on how quick customers respond and take even longer than telephonic surveys. These are very helpful when the customers are from varied geographical areas, consumes little cost, but takes time rather compared to other types of surveys.

Using internet and email surveys are effective methods as they take very less amount of time, low cost and can reach the wide variety of groups all over the world. This is the fastest method to distribute the survey and it should be made sure that the user belongs to the target group.

However, there are several pros and cons to each of the survey methods. Quantitative methods can deliver the statistical data and numerical point of view in a short period of time but it is difficult to understand the complete picture of the target marketplace. The quantitative survey helps to understand the size of the market and its scope but does not provide much information about the position of the organization’s brand in the market which in turn does not help the organization to improve its growth. Qualitative survey at the same time provides the position of the brand in the market by focusing on the small groups and demographic locations.

It would always be the best method to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods to get a better understanding of the product in market scenario and make decisions which enhance the overall productivity, efficiency of the organization.

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