An Overview Of Marketing Research

Marketing research is often partitioned into two sets of categorical pairs, either by target market:

• Consumer marketing research, and
• Business-to-business (B2B) marketing research.

Or, alternatively, by methodological approach:

• Qualitative marketing research, and
• Quantitative marketing research.

Consumer marketing research is a form of applied sociology that concentrates on understanding the preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers in a market-based economy, and it aims to understand the effects and comparative success of marketing campaigns.The field of consumer marketing research as a statistical science was pioneered by Arthur Nielsen with the founding of the ACNielsen Company in 1923.


Thus, marketing research may also be described as the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis, and dissemination of information for the purpose of assisting management in decision making related to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in marketing. The goal of market research is to obtain and provide management with viable information about the market (e.g. competitors), consumers, the product/service itself etc.