Marketing Research

B) Does his company conduct marketing research?

i) If no, why is it that the company is not conducting marketing research?

If time is an issue, conducting elaborate marketing research will do no good. Sometimes a situation arises where a decision must be made quickly. You might be better off convening the company's business experts for an urgent discussion of the situation, alternative courses of action, and the selection of the course to take. In other instances, you may lack the financial resources, or the internal staff for proper marketing research. In these cases, you may also rely on the business experts and the secondary research already available to you.

Also, if the decision you want marketing research to help you make has little impact on profit, market share, customer loyalty, brand equity, or any other marketing performance indicator, then it makes no sense to do marketing research. Marketing research can be costly both in terms of time and money, so if the benefit of the research doesn't at least pay for itself in the dollars and manpower expended to conduct it, it's worthless. You also need to consider the opportunity costs of that research. If you do research on a problem whose solution adds little value, the time and money could have been better used to research a different problem with a bigger payoff, and that opportunity is lost.

ii) How is the company surviving or doing without marketing research?

Position yourself as a strategic thinker. This is important. If you’ve got a conscience, you might feel guilty or stupid when you reflect that you’re wasting corporate money on pricey nonsense. The vaccination to such remorse is to drink the cool-aid of marketing geeks everywhere and pretend that marketing is an strategic expense without which a company withers and dies and try to be the one who understand the customers, the people who pay the money, make sure all key decisions in the company must have marketing approval, thus giving you...