Management Reflection - week 8

Last week, the focus for the course was on marketing. The market research section seemed familiar to me because I often participated in the research without realising it myself. The purpose of market research is basically to help companies understand the opportunities and problems between themselves and the customers. To do research before launching a product seemed pretty self explanatory to me because why would anyone buy your product, if it was not what the customers were looking for?

Then the lecturer talked about the different categories of market research. Exploratory, descriptive and causal, each differ in terms of the magnitude of the research. Causal is simply compare product A to product B, an experimental research. Exploratory research is when the company is unaware of it's problems therefore doing research on finding out where it is going wrong. Descriptive is when the company is aware of it's problems and therefore doing research on how to solve it.

The lecturer mentioned the site Smile City, how they conduct market research on selected individuals. Being a member of the site, I recalled the different kind of surveys I had received and now understands how the research works. Occasionally I get surveys which falls into the exploratory area while other times I get yes, no questions which means they are descriptive or causal questions.