Businesses all have their own ethical obligations. As a market researcher, you too have ethical guidelines you need to keep in mind when preparing to conduct research or start looking for secondary data. To fully understand business ethics, we have provided an ethics checklist, along with a list of common unethical market research concerns that may arise during the research process.

Most everyone would agree that market research is extremely important. There are hundreds of ways accurate market research can help a company, and that’s why every company should conduct beneficial research. The thing that tends to give market research a bad reputation is when companies carry out unnecessary research that gives company leaders the impression that market research is not valuable, overpriced and irrelevant. And, that simply isn’t true!

Research from food industry reports continue to show the increase in two eating habits of Americans: we are starting to make healthier food choices, and we are having more snacks throughout the day. The idea of having three meals a day is beginning to fade, and the age of snacks is moving in. The trend of healthy snacks is predicted to have increasing sales within the next decade, and this growth is driving healthy snack bars to include healthier and high-protein ingredients. Industry leaders are taking advantage of cereal/granola bars #2 sales ranking for snacks by creating their own snack bars. Popularity of companies promoting their own snack bars, as well as including high-protein bars in their selection has become a new trend for industry leaders.

Market Research can be separated into two basic categories: problem-identification research and problem-solving research. Problem-identification research helps marketing teams identify what types of problems they might have, while problem-solving research helps identify ways to solve those problems through marketing mix and segmentation. There are many problem identification and solving methods that can be completed through market research. Take a look at the examples below to see which methods can benefit your company.

Because of the constantly evolving business environment, it can be difficult to keep up with the pace of all the changes. When it comes to market research, the entire concept of marketing has changed due to technological advancements and the emergence of social media. So, as a business leader, you must make sure your marketing teams are using all of their resources efficiently.

When utilizing secondary data to help make important marketing decisions, failing to check the reliability of that data could lead to inaccurate analyses and poor business decisions.

With today’s accessibility to data via the internet, anyone can publish anything from anywhere, so not everything posted online can be trusted. In order to ensure the accuracy and validity of any external secondary data, you should follow an evaluation process.  

With all the big data that can be presented and purchased, marketing teams can easily become overwhelmed with the task of analyzing that data.So, how do we determine what is actually viable information that can be useful for our companies? The best way to ensure you are getting the most out of your marketing data is to define your research objectives and goals. A great way to start your next marketing research project is to use the following steps of the Marketing Research Process.