Marketing:

Five Ways of Executing a Marketing Analysis

Launching a new company or product brings with it great excitement. Translating this excitement into profits or gains will be the core challenge or your business.

Following are some steps to completing a successful and thorough market analysis:

1. If this is a new product, you need to look at what you have done with products in the past and how you have marketed them. For a new company, you need to look at other companies that sell similar products like your own and try to learn from their strategies. Try to figure out the essence of your product and what kind of people it will attract. If you are marketing several new products at the same time, you need to know if you want to hone in on one or two products or give all the new ones equal treatment.
   
   
2. Next, you need to go out and find people to conduct surveys as to how the general public might react to your new product or in a case of a new company, how it would react to a new company and the array of products it represents. This is an invaluable piece of research and if you really go about this correctly, you can assess your market, see what people really want and if they need or desire this product or company and the improvements that you can make. If you can go out there, even using the CIR, consumer information reports, and get the right information out of the people, then you can make the successful product. This is an essential part of the market analysis.
   
   
3. Next you need to select your research methods. There are two basic types of research methods. First on the list is qualitative research, which tries to put things in perspective for the consumer by asking open-ended questions. It tries to learn about their behavior while giving out information about products. Open-ended questions are usually those that require elaborated answers. Next is quantitative research, which tries to put thing in perspective for the retailer. This involves questions that require answers in the form of yes or no. It can also be done using multiple choices involving rating scales or the degree of agreement or disagreement. Following are some ways to conduct this research:
   
   a. In-person research involves spending some money. You can usually setup tables at different public places like downtown or in shopping malls and ask people passing by to fill out questionnaires or ask them questions verbally and record them. This may not be very effective because people on the move tend to have a short attention span and their answers might not correctly represent what they really feel.
   
   b. Mailing out questionnaires is another effective way to conduct research about a product. It is also expensive, especially if they get tossed out before being opened. However, people who take the time to fill them out at their own leisure can really provide helpful information.
   
   c. Conducting telephone surveys is a very successful method right now. People tend to talk on the phone with a lot more ease. But you have to be careful because a lot of people don't like talking to telemarketers. Phones are good way of conducting qualitative and quantitative research equally.
   
   d. A popular method with advertising companies is observation. You watch the actions of the people without interrupting them and draw your conclusions from that. An example would be having people taste two different colas, one from your company and one from the competitor and seeing people's reactions to both. This is good way of conducting quantitative research.
   
   
4. Now that you have collected your data, you need to analyze it with scrutiny. The conclusions that you draw from this data will be crucial to the development of your product and it will successfully help you market it.
   
   This step is crucial one. This is where all the marketing plans take place. All the information gathered in the previous steps has to be useful for this step to work. Everyone involved needs to have this step in mind when they are performing or working on all the steps mentioned before. This is where you make all the decisions leading up to the marketing plan.
   
   
5. When you sit down with all your data and you begin to pour it all into a marketing plan, one final question you need to ask yourself is, will it help me sell my product? This question might look naïve to many people but in business this is what it comes down to. If after all your research and through marketing plan development, you still can't answer this question, then you have wasted your time, money, and energy. So keep this question in mind all the way to the end. In your marketing plan, try to answer this question in the most honest and best way you can.