Marketing Research And Communication

Objectives of the research   

Market research is one of the most important aspect of marketing as it gives out an in depth idea and insightful information about the target market, competition and the expansion scope along with the growth of the business as well as the industry. Market research facilitates, the strategy and planning procedure organizes the policy and decision making of the business organization. Market research is essential in every step that a company takes whether it is a large scale operation or a small scale business, without having relevant information about the business environments it is impossible for an organisation to take any decision (Sarstedt and Mooi 2014).

The objective of market research is basically to get an insight about customers and target market of the business. Customer satisfaction is one of the most significant ideas behind creating and marketing products. Market research helps in finding out the strengths and opportunities of the business by reviewing and analysing data.  The company also can understand where there is a gap in what the customer wants and what is being provided by the company. The weaknesses of the product or service are also brought into the light with the help of market survey. Some of the key objectives of customer satisfaction market survey are:

• To understand the market segmentation
• To identify the growth while diversifying the product
• To get an in-depth review about the level of customer satisfaction and prospects of improvement
• To identify the gap of performance by the company on the existing products.

Fulfilment of objectives

In order to fulfil the objectives of the market research it is important for a large scale business organization to team up with a research company who will do the needful as per the requirements of the business. The management of the company should keep a check on the research process in order to try to ensure that the research is performed in an effective and professional way and that the data collected and analyzed by the third party is consistent. 
 The company needs to have an information base data collection of the existing customers who can give insights regarding the weakness and the requirement gap that has occurred in the product or service. The regular customers will also be able to answer the fact that whether a diversification of the product will be accepted by the people or what are the prospects of improvement. As Aldi is a supermarket chain and has ingrown brand as well, the company places itself in the market as a high quality and reasonable price product and service. Aldi is a multinational company that has a huge turn over. Research should take place depending on the market segmentation (Babin and Zikmund 2015).

Research takes place in two basic ways one is secondary and the other is primary. Under these categories there are other sub categories. Secondary research forms the fundaments of the primary research it is the information that is gathered and analyzed form the documents and journals that are already available in the particular subject or topic. Reviewing and understanding this data saves time and a lot of effort it also makes the primary research process a lot easier. For a super market brand like Aldi there are several documents that are already available. Any research process requires a plan and a strategy to proceed (Szolnoki and Hoffmann 2013). To understand the customer satisfaction of Aldi what is first required is to find out which outlets have the maximum number of footfall and gather information about the customers from those outlets and stores (McQuarrie 2015). As Aldi is a multinational company it is important for the research company to understand that the buying behaviour of a person heavily depends on the cultural background of that person. If a questionnaire is being prepared to be circulated among the existing customers for the purpose of primary research there are several points to be kept in mind. Firstly, the company should make the questions compact and to the point. Secondly, the questions should be relevant to the location it is catering. Thirdly, the language of the questions should be grammatically correct and should be in easy language for everyone to understand (Yin 2013). Fourthly, there should not be many questions as it has the potential to take away interest from the customers. One of the biggest aspects of market research is gathering of sample, therefore it is important for the company to have a clear idea about the specific topic that has to be research. Gap analysis is a large topic; the company should narrow down the idea to a single path so that the focus is not all over the place. If the central idea is set, the sampling will also be easy and more accurate resulting in a better analysis and review of data collected from this sample. Stores should have a list of loyal customers and a record of how frequently these people visit the stores, to identify the loyal customers the research company can go through the records of billing (Amphora, Birks and Wills 2013).

Conclusion

In order to analyze the gap in between what Aldi is offering and what is expected by the customers there can be several option for the company. Firstly the managers of the stores can be appointed to gather information from the customers as feedback. Feedback forms can be gathered ad analyzed by the research company. Customers can be emailed questioner for the improvement of the services and the products that Aldi has to offer. There should be an account in which managers of different stores record the cases of grievances and complaints that has been escalated by the customers, that account is very insightful and will give out a lot of in depth knowledge about the satisfaction level of the company along with the gap that has been created on the behalf of the business. A manager who is responsible to carry out an research process should have a clear mind as a pre-determined idea about the outcome can hinder the analysis process making it biased.

References:

Babin, B.J. and Zikmund, W.G., 2015. Exploring marketing research. Cengage Learning.

Malhotra, N.K., Birks, D.F. and Wills, P., 2013. Essentials of marketing research. Pearson.

McQuarrie, E.F., 2015. The market research toolbox: a concise guide for beginners. Sage Publications.

Ormston, R., Spencer, L., Barnard, M. and Snape, D., 2014. The foundations of qualitative research. Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers, 2.

Ritchie, J., 2003. The applications of qualitative methods to social research. Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers, 24, p.e46.

Sarstedt, M. and Mooi, E., 2014. A concise guide to market research. The Process, Data, and.

Szolnoki, G. and Hoffmann, D., 2013. Online, face-to-face and telephone surveys—Comparing different sampling methods in wine consumer research. Wine Economics and Policy, 2(2), pp.57-66.

Yin, R.K., 2013. Case study research: Design and methods. Sage publications.