Don’t have a crystal ball? Marketing research is the closest thing.
In this Meet the Experts episode, Professor Jaclyn Tanenbaum explains the importance and benefits of marketing research.
In the bustling world of business, truly understanding what your customers think and want is more than just useful - it's essential. Whether it's launching a new product, rolling out an ad campaign or deciding where to spend your marketing budget, research helps you move forward with confidence. This is the core message conveyed by Professor Jaclyn Tanenbaum, Ph.D., a renowned expert in marketing research and a key figure in the Master of Science in Marketing program of the FIU Chapman Graduate School of Business.
Watch the full interview with Jaclyn Tanenbaum on our YouTube Channel.
Full Transcript
Jaclyn Tanenbaum: Marketing research is so important because it helps firms both large and small take some of the guesswork out of their strategic planning. It's kind of like having a crystal ball, at times. Marketing research can be used to help firms generate, test and validate different types of ideas. It can gauge consumer response to different product offerings, different campaign elements or product redesigns, for that matter, and we can do all that prior to the company making a large investment in any of those things. So, it can be really helpful.
Marketing research can also help firms measure and monitor the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and see if they need to tweak anything or optimize anything while things are in market. Marketing research can help identify trends in the marketplace, whether that's consumer sentiment or maybe even some competitive intelligence and see what's going on from that perspective. If we understand all of these different components, we can use that information to even predict outcomes for marketing effectiveness in the future.
Marketing research is really interesting because in a lot of cases, firms understand what's going on inside their organization, but they don't always know what's going on outside their own walls. So, you can use marketing research to kind of get a finger on the pulse and understand what's happening outside of your own conference room or outside of your own boardroom.
Last thing that I think is really interesting when we're thinking about the importance of marketing research, is that we have the opportunity when working with marketing research partners not to employ this, “Well, we think this might work,” or “We think we know an approach,” and we can really go more with data-driven decision-making because then we have a much greater understanding of what's actually going on, which can be really helpful.
In our classes and in our program, in the Master of Science in Marketing program, this is what we're teaching inside of our classrooms. We're talking about why marketing research is so important, how we can use marketing research to help us make decisions and make decisions with the information that we can find or information that we can derive ourselves from our marketing research projects so that we can be the best marketer that we can be.