Market Research and Organizational Design

Abstract

Globalization is the strongest impetus for companies intending to expand their business from global marketplace to bottom-of-the-pyramid, or vice versa for local companies going global. Staying global and abreast of market developments requires companies to engage in continuous market research to analyze demand, supply, consumer behavior, pricing, competition, and innovation and technology dynamics. As companies invest in building global strategies to gain competitive advantage, the need to understand consumers in new destinations continuously increases. Marketing research is the one and only conventional mechanism through which companies understand their current as well as potential customers. Companies are in a race to enhance their outreach and contemplate competitively advantageous destinations by facing the challenge of utilizing varying market research results for domestic and international markets. Hence, companies must strengthen and equip their organizational platform to develop strategies arising from changing market research outcomes. In an effort to become customer-centric, companies should develop market research design and implementation following appropriate research studies. Several factors represent the underlying market challenges, and efficient companies address them in order to conduct market research across destinations (Young and Javalgi, 2007).

Companies often drive innovation to bring change in the market for competitive advantage. Breakthrough innovations reduce the cost and time of manufacturing a product or delivering a service with the desired quality and competitive advantage. One of the most challenging issues in the process is to conduct appropriate market research on tangible and intangible factors like market change management, improvement in the products and services, and enhancing customer values with focus. Most companies conduct market research to develop competitive strategies for reducing costs and optimizing profit. This chapter examines both informal and formal methods of market research and the evidence that experienced marketers will use both research modalities. The chapter also addresses the issues critical to quality and concerning voice of customers. It indicates that decision makers who listen directly to dissatisfied or lapsed customers and pair those conversations with formal data develop a more visceral idea on consumer choices and on designing dynamic marketing campaigns. Among other issues the taxonomy of market research, statistical research methods, the framework of international marketing research, organizational design, and human resources management are also addressed in this chapter.