Purpose of Research 2

Market research is the process of collecting valuable information to help you find out if there is a market for your proposed product or service. All the information gathered from the market research helps budding entrepreneurs make wise and profitable decisions

Market research would be used if the person designing or releasing the product wants it to become profitable, the creator needs to know what people want and needs to tailor his product to their needs or alternatively needs to see what kind of people would like his product and needs to tailor it to them.

Market research would provide the creator with the basic over-view and the basic landscape of the public opinion on things and on what people want and what they are willing to pay for. The kind of information that would be found in market research might be who is currently buying what you have for sale, what the people who buy your product are like, why people are not buying it, who is your competitor, what is the right price and etc.

An example of market research might be the Coca-Cola fail in the mid 1980s during the decline of coca-cola. The company believed that the decline of coca-cola was its taste, and not the marketing, so ''New Coke'' was born, New Coke was a much sweeter version of the original cola. The Coca-Cola company did blind taste tests with 20,000 people and the majority favoured the New Coke over the original version and Pepsi. What went wrong was that they assumed that taste was the deciding factor in consumer purchase behaviour. The consumers also weren't told that Coca-Cola was going to discontinue the original coke in favour of the new recipe. The other thing that went wrong was that no one at the Coca-Cola company realised the symbolic value and emotional involvement people had with the original coke, that may have been the deciding point in the failure of New Coke.

Production research is always needed when developing a new product. It is research to help give information on the characteristics of the product. It focuses on the production of a product, in other words, how it's made. For example, advertisements are all made to sell themselves to the audience, so its down to the producers of the adverts to use production research to get more information on characteristics

When companies do production research it helps them see an overview of the commercial viability, which is businesses skills to be successful and gain profit. The company has to be commercially viable first otherwise the won't be as profitable as they want to be and will start to go downhill