Role of marketing research

Marketing research is the systematic gathering and analysis of data about issuses relating to marketing product and services. Marketing research is partitioned into two sets consumer marketing research and business to business marketing research. The role of marketing research is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid and current information. Marketing manager make many strategic decisions in the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs. These decisions are about opportunities, target market selection, planning, marketing performance and control. These decision are complicated by interaction between the marketing variable of product, pricing, promotion and distribution. And other problems which arise in decisions making are uncontrollable environmental factors such as economic conditions, technology, cultural and social changes. Most important is the complexity of consumers. Marketing research helps the marketing manager to link marketing variables with environment and the consumers. It helps to remove some of the uncertainty by providing relevant information about environment, the marketing variables and consumers. The role of marketing research in managerial decision making explained by framework of DECIDE
D: define the marketing problem
E: enumerate the controllable and uncontrollable decision factors
C: collect relevant information
I: identify the best alternative
D: develop and implement a marketing plan
E: evaluate the decision and decision process.

Bacially marketing research is collecting of data about the product or service and we need marketing research because it provide us accurate data. If their is no marketing research the main problem arise that how we know what our customers need and their wants. It help to create link with customers and matketing variables.

reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_research