Advantages of marketing research

The main advantage of market research is to provide insightful, actionable information about a market for products and services. That said, market research is both a discipline and an art. The discipline aspect is that valid market research must be conducted by correctly identifying the population to be researched, using appropriate statistical controls for sampling, constructing questionnaires that solicit answers in a neutral manner and analyzing the resulting data with appropriate statistical methods and tests. Doing so, provides information about markets that can be relied upon for making business decisions. Businesses use market research to develop new products and to determine their viability, to assess their performance in light of competition, to test and refine marketing communications, to track perceptions of brands, to help determine pricing, and to measure advertising effectiveness.