Market research is the function that links the consumer, customer and public to the marketer through information-information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems. generate, refine and evaluate marketing actions: monitor marketing performance: and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Market research is a well planned, systematic process which implies that it needs planning at all the stages.
There are some limitations of the market research because is being carried out by human beings. The market research is not exact science. Thus, the results and conclusion drawn upon the using market research are not very accurate. The results are very vague as market research is carried out on consumers, suppliers, intermediaries, etc who are humans. Humans have the tendency to behave artificial when they know that they are being observed.
The research goes through some stages in order to get the required information stages are we need to discover the problems, selection of exploration research. probability or non probability, collection of data, editing and coding, data processing, interpretation of data and report findings. This is down to ensure that the information obtained is reduce to the lowest minimum to informed decision making.
The are various ways of collecting data such as primary data that is data that have never being used before and secondary data that is data that have being used before and being gathered for future reuse. There is qualitative research and quantitative research.