Your professors sit there and wonder what they can get you to do as coursework, and yes the best they can come up with a market research assignment, predominantly based on desk research. This keeps you in the library and out of trouble while making it easy to compare this academic years’ marketing students in one easy process.
In the real world…
The majority of market research is done by people who know little or nothing of the product or service. Their job is to research and make nice pretty reports. This research takes months to gain any form or quality. In olden times, 1960’s when marketing was discovered by Theodor Levitt this was fine, but in the post Steve Jobs days, it is not. Data must flow faster than money for it to make money. Otherwise its value is zero. The stock exchanges of the world have long understood this, free data feeds on stock value are delayed by only 15 minutes. Most marketing data is at normally on average one year old. So how valid could then be?
So off you go and ask some random sample of people on the local high street and ask them a series of questions, do you like my product?, how much would you pay?, would you recommend it? and finally their demographics. You ask me these questions on a Saturday afternoon while I am out shopping and I tell you anything you want to hear to get rid of you, especially if you are offering me and my family an IPAD 3 or a trip to DisneyLand (The LA one and not the cheap one across the channel).
The true and ONLY test to see if someone will buy it is to offer it for sale. Steve Jobs knew it. Never once did he do market research, how would you know if you want to use a tablet which is made of glass and aluminium when the only tablet you have ever used went into your month and you swallowed it. Its just one step too much for the man on the street. So spend the money on the hype and not on the research which will just out of date data.
If you have the product then sell it, if you don’t have the product then allow pre-orders. Marketing has to generate leads which generate sales, whenever you do marketing, research, strategy, planning, analysis, its have a single destination, a sale. If it’s your assignment then the payment is a 1st class honours degree.
Offer it for sale, ask for orders, what modifications would they require to part with their money today. You take the money on a product delivery or return basis, so they never loose out. You take their email and telephone numbers, so they can become in and be part of your focus group, beta test users. You make them part of your user community and send them updates on everything that is happening. They have brought into you and your business and therefore are part of your new family, these are called loyal customers.
If you can’t get 10 people to buy into your concept, parting with real money then its time to go back to the concept drawing board, looking at the business model, customer needs, the products features and benefits and how you will get access to the right group of people who will part with their cash.
Yes, I hear all of you out there saying you need to understand your market, but we need to teach students about action and not information research paralysis. It’s the doing that makes the business and not the research. You don’t see Alan Sugar saying “go and research who will buy cup cakes at Westfields shopping centre”, he just says go out and have a go and come back, someone will get fired. And you know who that will be, it will not be the one doing the sales, it will be the one who spent the last few days researching what to do. In Dragon’s Den, the one with the letter stating they will purchase the product gets funding, the one who saying they have spent £450,000 on research, prototyping and further analysis gets a kick up the back side.
So decide now which one you are going to be?