Consumer Market Research: 3 Limitations You Must Know

Consumer Market Research: 3 Limitations You Must Know

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                                                        (Source: MSG, 2016)

“Market research is an optional, sometimes valuable business action that may reduce uncertainty enough to pay for itself…” Market research represents a tedious but highly essential and valuable function for any business to remain competitive, providing insight into consumer behavior, market trends and opportunities for timely exploitation apart from providing raw data for product development and business intelligence. However, in reality, the resulting data and outcome of the process with its potential benefits may not  be realized in full or even act counter to the objectives intended, often tainted with limitations.

Market research requires much time & expense which organizations may find rather laborious and lacking in justification due to the difficulty in establishing the ROI given its direct and indirect, supportive function across departments involved, from sales and marketing to customer services and finance as well as product design and development. Other than those directly benefiting from MR, it is usually hard for finance and engineering for example to place value on MR despite the rationale behind it. Does it represent a true tangible as they see it? Let me use the Hyundai Elantra case: the finance section was very much against the idea of a completely new car design built from scratch based on MR and the latest in engineering and design technology as advocated by the product design and engineering people but despite the company’s conservative stand, a huge gamble was made to come out with an outright winner that required immense resolve and funding. The result? Industry and market accolades! Mind you, Hyundai could have ended up in hot soup if the product had turned out wrong but they trusted their core business and technological competencies to pull it off, moving the money people aside in favor of a strong product/market push backed up by business intelligence and marketing savviness. My point? Spare no effort and expense to get your MR and thus vision right![pic 2][pic 3]

Reliability of the data is a question often posed by clients and management. Just how trustworthy is it?  Also, just how do we set a value to MR data for what we have laid out for the exercise which could span across the nation or continent and months? Validity of information and justification (the bang for the bucks) come hand in hand in decision-making as we build up the marketing intelligence which can be compromised starting at the base level due to the use of lead questioning, unrepresentative sampling and biased interviewing, etc. Data integrity will obviously come at a higher cost high cost will add to budgetary constraints, a never-ending problem for field operatives and management. However, with the advent of technology and improved knowledge bases, we have been able to capitalize on both internal and external data via highly reliable, automated data gathering to advance marketing and product development efforts once we realize their potential. General Motor’s OnStar subscription-based vehicular tracking system provides so much data related to vehicle security, theft and recovery, diagnostics, etc that it amounts to a customer activity cum product protection as well as communication system that aggregates much valuable information from the field. Who needs questionnaires and other surveys here? The actions and outcomes speak for themselves! OnStar is now providing customers with online content and streaming beyond the original business objectives within its inception, integrating functionality with needs using mobile technology, GPS and of course MR together with customer relationship management. There are limitations everywhere, but one should not be constrained by the very thought: carpe diem should be the order of the day!