According to the definition of AMA (American Marketing Association) market research is defined as a function that links consumer, customer & public to the marketer via information. Information that is used for identifying & defining various marketing opportunities and problems plus produce, monitor marketing performance, refine and examine marketing actions and improve the understanding of marketing as a process. Market research identifies the information that's required to address these issues, develops the methods to collect information, manages & implements the process of data collection, evaluates the results and conveys the findings and their implications.

Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is a market research method that plays an important role in conducting customer satisfaction research, customer value analysis, market segmentation research, brand equity research, branding & naming research, and research about new products.

This kind of market research is the best developmental & exploratory method of market research. As the name suggests qualitative market research stands for more of "quality" than quantity. Such methods are designed to talk to relatively a few people in the list of target audience. Plumbing the depths & range of buyer attitudes & beliefs is the most important goal of this kind of market research.

It's a powerful market research tool, which allows you to conduct focus groups, one on one interview, depth interviews & related qualitative market research projects for B2B clients. A business should know how to make use of qualitative research for marketing decision-making. As with all of the market researches, market strategy decision-making issues, if it's to have value must first drive the design of qualitative research.

Quantitative Research
Generally, a second phase of research is undertaken. While this takes place quantitative market research for companies to measure, quantify, estimate & segment the markets. Also, capabilities in phone surveys, online surveys, mail, in-person & intercept surveys.

These types of studies are designed to predict, assess and estimate the attitudes & behaviors of buyers. Such information is used to do market sizing, segmentation along with discovering the drivers for product & brand preferences.

Quantitative market research includes designing gauge, describing and forecasting quantity. Employing various sampling strategies, such a research studies often project results of the quantitative market surveys to the marketplace. Amongst the most popular methods of quantitative market research include:

§Online surveys
§Personal quantitative interviews.
§Mail surveys.
§Intercept studies.
§Phone surveys.

Data collection techniques such as personal interviews, telephonic interviews, online interviews are recommended by the quantitative research. However, selection of these techniques depends on various factors such as time requirements, research objective and quality control issues etc.

Where qualitative research is more exploratory & directional in nature and is designed to bring out the issues related with the subject matter. Such researches provide you with a clue about the best general direction to proceed in. Quantitative research, conversely, is designed to be rigid & analytical. Such researches produce more accurate statistically as compared to qualitative research.

Most of the times, companies first go for qualitative research during the process of concept development & later go for quantitative research to fine-tune & optimize the data.

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