Contemporary Applications Of Marketing Research

1. Competitive Advantage.

The notion that achieving superior performance requires a business to gain and hold an advantage over competitors is central to contemporary strategic thinking. Businesses seeking advantage are exhorted to develop distinctive competencies at the lowest delivered cost or to achieve differentiation through superior value. The assessing competitive advantage can be done in number of ways. The methods can be broadly classified as market-based and process-based assessment Market-based assessment is direct comparison with a few target competitors, whereas process-based assessment is a comparison of the methods employed.

2. Brand Equity.

Brand equity is defined as a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand that add to or subtract from the value of a product or service to a company and/ or its customers. The assets or liabilities that underlie brand equity must be linked to the name and/or symbol of the brand. The assets and liabilities on which brand equity is based will differ from context to context. However, they can be usefully grouped into five categories:

a)      Brand loyalty

b)      Name awareness

c)      Perceived quality

d)     Brand association

e)      Other proprietary brand assets: patents, trademarks, channel relationships etc.

3. Customer satisfaction.

The measurement of customer satisfaction and its link to product/service attributes is the vehicle for developing a market-driven quality approach This approach requires a sequential research design that uses the results from each research phase to build and enhance the value of subsequent efforts. During this process, it is imperative to study customers who were lost, to determine why they left This issue must be addressed early in the system design The steps involved in customer satisfaction is

a)      Define goals and how information will be used

b)      Discover what is really important to customers and employees

c)      Measure critical needs

d)     Act on the information

e)      Measure performance overtime

f)       Issues in questionnaire design and scaling in satisfaction research

4. Total quality management

TQM Is a process of managing complex changes In the organization with the aim of improving quality.

The power of measurements is clearly visible in applications of quality function deployment (QFD), a Japanese import used to make product design better reflect customer requirements. In QFD. A multifunctional team measures and analyzes in great detail both customers attitudes and product attributes. Marketing research plays a crucial role at this stage of the process. Then the team creates a visual matrix in order to find ways to modify product attributes (engineering characteristics) so as to improve the product on the customer-based measures of product performance. Along the way, the team must develop a series of measures of several different types.