Marketing research and development includes six major steps:

1. Analyzing The Market
2. Determining The Target Market
3. Discovering A Needed Product
4. Deciding Features To Provide Desired Benefits
5. Developing a Profitable and Marketable Product
6. Marketing Your Product

I’m covering the first two of these steps in today’s post and will cover the remaining ones in consecutive posts.

Marketing Research And Development
Analyzing The Market

Analyzing the market uses marketing research to discover unmet needs. It includes two major kinds of marketing research.

Qualitative research gathers lots of information and then attempts to make sense of that information. It’s easy to start, but difficult to analyze.

Quantitative research uses data that can be converted to numbers. It’s difficult to set up, but easy to analyze using statistical software.

Analyzing the market starts with qualitative research and moves to quantitative research. The two steps in this post use qualitative research.

The first step is to analyze the market by monitoring it to discover people’s expressed needs. For example, if you’re business is on line, you can monitor forums and social networking sites in your niche. If your business is off line, you can keep track of what people request that you don’t have and listen as potential customers talk.

You record all expressed needs, looking for those mentioned most often. This can be difficult because people express the same needs in different words. You have to interpret what they mean. Then you categorize the needs and look for commonalities between them.

You also record as much information as available about the people expressing the needs.

Monitoring the environment is a time consuming process, but prepares you for the next step in the marketing research and development.

Marketing Research And Development
Determining The Target Market

Your records about the people expressing needs, provide the first clues about your target market.

• Are they primarily one gender or one age group?
• Are their needs related to a certain experience or education level?
• What do they have in common beyond expressing the need?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can conduct more research with similar people. You can gather a group of them and ask them questions about the needs. This group meeting of target market members is called a focus group.

There are guidelines for conducting a good focus group that you should consider if you plan to do it yourself. You can access mine at another of my sites linked below:

Strategic Publications: Focus Groups

Many marketing and public relations agencies will do an excellent job for you. However, expect to pay thousands for one focus group.

After the focus group is completed and analyzed, you can use the information to conduct a survey with more target market members.

Following these two steps starts developing effective marketing research and development.

In my next post, I’ll cover using surveys to discover a needed product, and the features that it should include. You can access it below:

Marketing Research And Development 2

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Posted 10-17-08:
Marketing Research And Development 1

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