Role of Market Research in Term Paper

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What is lacking however are programs to better monitor competitors, understand more macro-economic and larger industry trends, and also understand how substitute technologies could potentially influence the company's direction. In short, the company's market research department excels at the short-range projects yet is either neglecting or doesn't have the resources to deal with the longer-range research areas that will also impact the company.

Each of these areas of shortcoming will next be analyzed, in addition to a series of recommendations for making the department more effective at the longer-term market research needs going unmet today.

Background

The company I work for manufactures high technology products including parts for computer equipment used in personal computers and network routing equipment used for creating local area networks. As this is a fast-changing industry the ability to monitor and capitalize on longer-term trends is critical for our company, which is an area of market research activity not addressed today.

Lack of Competitive Analysis

Despite the intensive pricing analysis completed internally and the use of competitors' pricing only for our own benchmarking, there is a lack of in-depth competitive intelligence and continual monitoring of their product, promotional and pricing strategy moves.

Market research needs to track competitors' product lifecycles more closely, so that at any time, product management and product marketing can see graphically how each competitor has chosen to enter the market, with which product and feature set, and which price, through which channels, and with what value proposition.
None of this is captured today; instead there are only Adobe Acrobat files of competitive brochures. Clearly there needs to be a better system for managing this information.

Second, market research needs to do put a methodology in place for monitoring price moves by competitors and tracking them on a per configuration basis relative to our own configurations and pricing. Our sales force often must do this analysis quickly in the middle of completing quotes, and often their pricing information is wrong. Market research needs to be able to complete this analysis continually and have a database to track it.

Monitoring Customer Loyalty Long-Term

With the short-term nature of our market research departments, projects there isn't enough time or concentration on monitoring customer loyalty long-term through any sustained research effort. We have no idea, over the long-term, why customers stay with our company or not. Our sales force says it is.....

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