Most important fields of marketing research

Business today is using marketing research in a variety of ways. These can be grouped into four major categories: (1) product and service research, (2) market research, (3) sales research, and (4) advertising research.
The intensive competition of the postwar world led many companies to intensify their product research in order to develop new products. Product planning will be treated in detail in another chapter. Here we take note of the great increase in the marketing research activities connected with new product development.
More and more companies are discovering the need for accurate and reliable information for the development and successful commercialization of new products. Product and service research includes the study of the acceptability of new products, consumer reactions to present products and packages, the study of competitors' lines, and product testing. About 45 per cent of all companies doing organized marketing research use marketing research facilities for product information and testing.
Market research was the original type of research done, but this has become greatly intensified and augmented as more marketing executives have learned to rely on market facts for decision-making. Finding facts about the market-size, location, preferences-is the traditional kind of marketing research with which most students of marketing are familiar. But we go beyond that now, and establish also the characteristics of the market, market changes, and the share of the market and what a company can do to increase its share. Some 85 per cent of all companies that do organized marketing research engage in studies of this kind.
Most companies have studied sales figures for a long time. An organized discipline of sales research, however, is relatively new, though growing in importance. This area includes studies to determine sales territories, allocation of manpower, compensation of salesmen, development of equitable quotas, and the use of premiums and other sales stimulants. This area of research also delves into test markets, customer audits (breakdown of customers by size, lines carried, relative profitability, and types of customers) and channels of distribution. Between 75 and 95 per cent of business firms doing organized marketing research engage in sales research in one form or another.
Traditionally, advertising research was restricted to media analysis, copy research, and projective techniques. Projective techniques will be discussed later in this chapter. But the great publicity that advertising has received in recent years, and the waves of public and private criticism that have swept over advertising in all its forms, have focused manage merit attention on the need for finding out more about advertising as a social and economic force.