Marketing research is an important part of a company's deciding process. However, there are multiplication to do merchandising research and multiplication not to. When it keeps you on top of the markets in which your company operates; helps you reach a strategic merchandising advantage; enables you to select the course that reachs your key merchandising objectives; or clarifies problems or investigates marketplace trends that affect your merchandising goals, you should, by all means, conduct research.
However, there are certain multiplication when you should NOT conduct research. First and foremost, you should not do merchandising research if you have not first defined the problem you need to solve. Problem definition is the single most important step in the merchandising research process. If not done - or done incorrectly - any research performed will be useless. Granted, somemultiplication companies have no idea what the merchandising problem is, so they must then do exploratory research, to help them identify the problem. In that instance, there is a business problem, and that is to determine what is causation the company's current merchandising situation.
You probably also don't need merchandising research if:
You have access to promptly available merchandising information
Your gross revenue force may know its territories very well and each gross revenue representative may understand the environment in which he or she calls on. They may know the price of the competition's products in those markets, likewise as the in question competitors there, and how much it costs to acquire clients there. In addition, the Internet has made all kinds of merchandising information freely available, and data sources like Dun & Bradstreet's Million Dollar Database or ABI's ReferenceUSA has made determination information about prospective competition and clients a snap. As a result, secondary research may be all you need to do to find the solutions to your merchandising problems.
There's not enough time or resources to conduct research
If time is an issue, conducting elaborate research will do no good. Somemultiplication a situation arises where a decision must be made quickly. In such a case, you power be fortunate convention the company's business experts for an pressing discussion of the situation, alternative courses of action, and the selection of the course to take. In other instances, you may lack the business enterprise resources, or the internal staff for proper merchandising research. In these cases, you may also depend on the business experts and the secondary research already available to you.
The research adds little or no value
If the decision you want research to help you make has little impact on gross revenue, profit, market share, client loyalty, brand equity, or any other merchandising performance indicator, then it makes no sense to do merchandising research. Research can be costly both in terms of time and money, so if the benefit of the research doesn't at to the worst degree invite out itself in the dollars and manpower spent to conduct it, it's worthless. You also need to consider the chance costs of that research. If you do research on a problem whose solution adds little value, the time and money could have been better accustomed research a different problem with a large payoff, and that chance is lost.
Knowing when you need to do research
Develop an internal monitoring system of your merchandising environment. If you have a system in place to compile information about your company and your competition, it will alert top direction to problems that merchandising research can attack. These days, you can set up e-mail alerts with Google and many major newspapers to keep you au courant of any news or blog posts about your company, your competition, and your industry. Also read your industry's trade publications and get intent on trade shows and conferences. Talk to your gross revenue force, your suppliers, and your clients. You can get a wealth of information gratis from these sources.
Knowing when not to do merchandising research is even as important as knowing when to do it. When merchandising research adds significant value or improves your competitive position, it's a go; when it's just "nice to know," it's a no!
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