Bax - Research

This ebook published in 2013 by

Kogan Page Limited

2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street

London EC1V 3RS

United Kingdom

www.koganpage.com

2013, Cambridge Marketing College

E-ISBN 9780749470708

Dedication

This handbook is dedicated to all of the people that in some small or large part made it happen. I am sure that you know who you are.

Special mentions go to the following people:

The directors of Anglian Windows who were instructed by their buyers to establish a market research and planning function and tasked me with doing it. This is where I learnt my research craft.

Steve Godwin, my marketing tutor, who provided me with the tools by which I could make sense of research data.

The late great Cliff Lavin, one of the most passionate researchers I have ever met, he conducted research for me as a client and was a good friend. He inspired me in terms of what research was capable of delivering.

The late Nigel Bradley, fellow marketing research tutor and friend, I miss our healthy debates on the subject very much.

Thank you too, to Charles Nixon for cajoling me into doing this and to Melissa Nixon, Kiran Kapur and Emma Garland for proof reading it.

Especial thanks to Emma Garland for helping with formatting, structure, comments and advice in my first faltering steps at creating something like this.

Lastly, my thanks to all Cambridge Marketing College delegates present and past who have studied CIM and MRS research courses with me and to all my research clients and respondents.

About the author

Steve Bax DMS MCIM AMRS FCMC Chartered Marketer

Steve is the Managing Director of Bax Interaction, a marketing research, strategy and training company based in Cambridge. He has over 30 years experience at senior and board levels in B2B, B2C and not-for-profit organisations.

Steve has been a tutor for Cambridge Marketing College since 1993, a leading centre for the delivery of Chartered Institute of Marketing courses. He teaches to post-graduate level and currently delivers modules including marketing information and research, project management in marketing, managing marketing and marketing leadership and planning. He has previously also delivered the Market Research Society Advanced Certificate.

Steve is a long-standing member of the CIM, a Chartered Marketer, an associate member of the Market Research Society and a Fellow of the Marketing College. Previously, he has worked as a CEO/CMO for a leading food exhibition company, Head of Marketing for a 25 million retail and manufacturing business, Head of a Research and Planning department and Manager of three business units for a 200 million home improvements business.

Steves marketing research understanding comes from having gained experience both on client and agency sides of the process since the late 1980s when he was asked to set up an internal research and planning function for a UK-wide organisation. He is passionate about the importance of using research insight to deliver better marketing results and this is reflected in his success in his organisational roles and the core offerings of his company, Bax Interaction, which undertakes quantitative and qualitative research studies for its clients.

Contents

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The visible shudder often seen when the words 'marketing research' are uttered clearly shows the fear that many people have of this key element of successful marketing! Perhaps it is seen as a 'dark art' practised by strange people who speak a different language? As with many marketing disciplines, jargon abounds in marketing research creating some of these misconceptions. This Handbook aims to bust the jargon and to explain the process in a straightforward, easy to understand, way.

Once understood, the power of marketing research will always be with you! You will be able to apply it with confidence and see how the insight it can deliver can make a real difference to your organisations marketing performance.

More data is available than ever before and the term Big Data is in common use to explain this. Of course the digital environment is the most significant change but the impact of this ever growing source of valuable data has been to change the way in which marketing research is conducted.

More than ever, data is being combined from multiple sources to inform marketing decisions. Data from social media, purchasing data, response data, web analysis and more is being combined to arrive at new insights. It is now relatively straightforward to conduct research in real time, wherever the respondent may be, and trigger a marketing activity based response almost instantly.

It is an exciting time for the research industry but there will be casualties. Traditional research methods, such as extensive fieldwork studies, are being questionned as more insight than ever is available from the digital space. The use of bots to trawl social media and web space are in common use and this data can be linked to other primary and secondary data to provide ever greater depths of understanding of customer behaviour.

The need to step back and think is still there though. Marketers need to take the longer-term view as well. Deep held perceptions and attitudes are hard to test by triggering a smartphone based survey to a potential respondent who has just made an impulse purchase, for example.

The landscape has probably changed forever with the volume of data we now generate. Core research values still apply to all of this though. When collecting data, transparency about the reason and consent for its use remain paramount. With the volume of data out there, assessing validity and reliability become more important than ever so that the right data to make marketing decisions upon are selected.

This is a straightforward guide to the key things that all marketers need to know about marketing research.

This Handbook takes the reader step by step through the basic principles of market and marketing research, the key roles that research plays in marketing decision making, how to go about planning your research, the types of data and key steps to follow in gathering them, how to go about getting your research done the all-important briefing and proposal process, specifics on secondary and primary data methodologies, how to justify research in financial benefit terms, how to decide on what sampling approach to use and the legal and ethical aspects that must be considered. Finally, this Handbook recognises the especial importance of digital research in todays world and covers this in detail in a separate section.

Market research looks at specific marketplaces; it describes users in those markets and how much product they may use. Marketing Research is the umbrella term to cover market and other research in relation to the marketing mix. It is used, even by researchers, interchangeably with Market Research.