According to Wikipedia, the information source Gen Z turns to most, “a brand is the name, design, symbol and other features that distinguish an organisation's goods or services from those of another organisation”. From launching a product or service, to running promotional activity and taking market share after launch, to the positioning and relaunches that keep it as high as possible on the product life cycle — many factors are at play. For the various marketing mixes described through frameworks ranging from the 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) to the 7Cs (Customer/consumer, Cost, Convenience, Communication, Caring, Co-ordinated, Confirmation), the greatest support comes from market research.
It is well known that market research is conducted for many different purposes and with a wide variety of methods. In this article I will focus on the research that can guide increasingly complex marketing strategies, and try to clarify the starting point at which the first steps of brand building are taken through product and service development. At this point two definitions found in every research and advertising brief deserve attention: “target audience” and “market structure”. The target audience can be briefly defined as the people or organisations expected to use the product or service. Yet in order to grow the market or increase market share, targeting different user groups becomes inevitable. Therefore, creating a new brand requires deciding on two main elements first: the product/service and the target audience. Briefly, here is the research used to clarify these two components and reduce the risk of failure:
• Penetration, market share measurement, usage and attitude studies, ethnographic research
These studies show the extent to which products and services in the market are used, what users expect from them and how brands meet those expectations — which makes them important in generating new product and service ideas. They are usually run as quantitative studies with the largest possible sample sizes. This makes it possible to see the market as a whole, evaluate potential opportunities and identify target audiences through subgroup analysis.
Another source that can be used to define the target audience is a company's internal records and customer data. Although new regulations have made personal-level data processing difficult for companies, this remains a serious area of investigation for firms that plan to offer different products and services through macro-level customer segmentation. Banks and mobile operators, for example, build customer segments based on product and service usage or spending levels, label us Gold, Platinum and so on, and try to reach us every day to present their new products and services. Ethnographic studies are also very useful for understanding the target audience in more detail and locating the relevant products and services within their daily lives. In this way, the “target audience” appears in front of marketers in flesh and blood.
• New idea development, concept testing
This is research designed both to test ideas developed by company managers and to uncover new product and service ideas within the framework of customer expectations. Projects run with qualitative methods are well suited to generating ideas from scratch to solve the marketing problems at hand, and/or to communicating existing ideas to the target audience in the most appropriate way and revising them. Supporting this with quantitative data to establish how well the product or service concept is accepted by the target audience considerably reduces the risk of error.
As we can see, market research can be very useful and cost-reducing when defining the target audience and the product or service. The only requirement is that the data collected is sound and the results are analysed well. Research results that are not analysed well and interpreted correctly can do more harm than good. That is why research agencies are now expected not simply to collect and analyse data and present it on PowerPoint slides, but to offer recommendations that show how the data plays out in the market.
To return to the title: you can do marketing without research, but choosing that path carries a higher risk of failure.
It is also possible to ask the question the other way round. My answer to that: you cannot do marketing with market research alone. If you could, most marketing VPs would come from a research background! That said, we need research agencies that create added value and do not read results at face value, just as much as we need those who conduct research based on quality data. When research teams — both client-side and agency-side — understand marketing, brand and internal company processes and make recommendations with that knowledge, the success rate goes up.