[MUSIC] So far we have been looking at the consumer behavior side of marketing decision processes. Today we are going to start on marketing research. Now marketers face different problems and these problems, in a way, create opportunities for the marketers. What we are going to consider today is why do we even need to have marketing research in the first place. So the marketing research process starts from the data collection, then of course, marketing researchers, analysis the data. Then based on the analysis of the data they come to certain information which is needed by, probably the people within the company, and then they interpret the results. So the question is, what is the relationship between marketing research and marketing management? Because marketing management is the entire process of building a entire marketing department. So marketing management, to begin with, we can think about it as two different components. One is the micro environment, and the second one is the macro environment. Now, in terms of the micro environment, we can think about the political, legal, or sociocultural environment. From the perspective of the macro environment, we can look at demographics, or the economic environment, or even the technological side. Overall, when you know the marketing environment, we come to the marketing actors, who are the relevant people in this entire marketing structure. They start from suppliers, consumers, computers, all for that matter, even the intermediary. So once you know the marketing environment and the marketing actors this is when you come to a state where you have to think about the interaction plan of the marketing department. So first one is planning, of course, then you go to control, implementation and then finally, and this is where marketing research comes in, is all about marketing research. This last phase of the action plan is marketing research. So it might look that marketing research is relatively small, or not so much important in the entire marketing decision process. But if you think about what we have been talking about in the consumer side and what we are going to talk about on the marketing research side, marketing research actually plays a very crucial role in combining all of the elements of marketing management, and then coming up with the most important conclusions which are relevant to the company. What are those conclusions like? These are called marketing mix, they start from the product, what product specifications you want to have. The price of the product, where you want to sell your product. So the place and finally, the promotions, which is the last, most important, thing from the perspective of the marketers. Once you know the four P's, which we just talked about, it's all about targeting the right consumers at the right time, and this is all about combining the elements of marketing management. Now, let's go into the components of marketing research. And we have already talked about things like economic environment, and there's some things which are internal to the corporate structure. Maybe the company policies, the personnel in the company and so on. You have to also think about competition, pricing, product distribution, promotion, or even, for that matter, buyer behavior. So, all these things come together, when we talk about marketing research. Now, the next point I am going to mention here, is about the organization structure of marketing research. Do companies do marketing research at each of their units, or do they do marketing research at a centralized level. Actually, there are pros and cons to both of them. Of course, if you do decentralized marketing research, you can focus on individual markets, the practices and problems. On the other hand, if you do a more centralized marketing research in a company, you can enjoy the benefits of economies of scale. And of course, you will have better control over the entire marketing research process. The next element of marketing research is the type of information delivery. So some projects, which are called marketing research projects, address a very specific marketing question. Those are probably small marketing research issues, but still very important to address. The second type of information delivery are called marketing information systems. These are more continuous monitoring processes, for more bigger marketing research questions. And these are usually done over a period of time and by a lot of people being involved. The final one is called the decision support systems. These are definitely more extensive issues being addressed, more challenging ones, and these are probably the most relevant ones, when you think about a company as a whole. Finally, in this introduction to marketing research we are going to talk about marketing dashboards. What are these marketing dashboards? These are simple and coherent set of information that allows marketers to assess the client situation, and they can act quickly based on that. And they use different metrics to use this marketing dashboard. What are the benefits of using a marketing dashboard, of course, it improves efficiency. Because remember, we're using certain measures to look at the effectiveness of the marketing research plan. Then you think about the efficiency, in terms of, linking it to different road systems. You can also think about making marketing actions more explicit. When talking about marketing dashboards we already talked about the benefits, but there are certain downsides to it. Of course, when you are looking at such measured items in a marketing dashboard, sometimes the long-term impact of these measures are very difficult to maintain, and so not very implementable. The other down side of a marketing dashboard, it sometimes promotes inefficient strategic behavior. Because you are providing certain very specific matrix but they are not relevant to the changing environment of the company or changing environment of the full industry. So it is important to remember that marketing dashboards, though very useful, can have certain negative elements to it as well. In the next video, we are going to look at the different stages of the marketing research process and then we'll know how to do the internal marketing research strategies for a company. Thank you. [MUSIC]
