Why Market Research is Vital for Business Success

Why Market Research is Vital for Business Success Successful businesses worldwide periodically conduct market research in order to stay tuned to changing market trends and to retain their competitive edge. Whether your business is in a start-up stage or in an expansion phase, market research is vital for understanding the critical characteristics of your target market to increase sales revenue, profit, ROI and overall business success.

The importance of market research can be best perceived by understanding the various factors that impact your business.

Market Information

This includes factors such as market size (in terms of number of customers), sales revenues (for existing products), market segmentation (geographic, gender, personality, etc.), the demand and supply scenario, and other factors.

Insight into Existing Customers

This requires understanding important customer decision-making triggers such as:

Why do customers select your products or those of your competitors?
What value do they perceive in your products?
What is the key decision factor? Is it service, product quality or prestige?
What factors influence buying decisions?
Which magazines and websites do they browse?

Identifying Potential Customers

New customers can be identified by understanding:

Who are likely to use your products?
What is their age group?
What is their gender?
What is their marital status (single, married or divorced)?
How many children do they have?
Where do they reside?

Customer Needs

Evaluate and understand the precise needs of potential customers and develop your products and services accordingly. Even existing products and services can be suitably modified based on the results of such market research.

Customer Behavior Patterns

Potential customers may exhibit behavior patterns and preferences, such as a preference for only one brand or switching brands frequently; trying out new products; a preference for products of a particular type, size, color, price range, or other such parameters.

Competitor Analysis

Research can provide you with valuable information about existing competitors, their adopted strategies, impact on target consumers (and their reactions), and other such details.

Identify Business Opportunities

Market research helps identify existing gaps and new business opportunities such as untapped or underserviced markets, as well as changing market trends such as population shifts, higher education levels, increased leisure spends and more.

Resolving Business Problems

A market research company can identify the cause of your business problems, if any, and suggest possible remedies. For example, decreased sales could result from the entry of a new competitor, a substitute product, reduced brand awareness or negative brand image.

Accurate Business Decisions

The information collected through research can enable you to set realistic expectations and make appropriate estimations about sales forecasting, market share, growth rate and other such critical factors.

Develop Business Strategies

Research data can help you in developing strategies for product or service pricing, distribution and logistics, advertising media usage (radio, TV, newspapers etc.), making decisions for new products and services, and timing the market. It can guide you towards better decisions on starting, consolidating, diversifying or reducing business activity.

The significance of market research is seen in the following benefits accrued by businesses:

Improved communications between the company and its target customers through accurate understanding of customer needs and meeting them effectively, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction
Minimized risk through precise analysis of the customer's exact demands and developing perfectly matching products and services, thus reducing errors and failures
Measuring business success through analysis of the research data and evaluation of business progress and growth. Even possible pitfalls and solutions can be gauged

Our Related Services

Flatworld Solutions is a leading market research company with expertise and experience in market research. We have a successful track record of providing cutting-edge reports to our clients and enabling them to make informed decisions and achieving rapid growth. Our team of qualified and experienced professionals has consistently met our customers' expectations.