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Business Operations: Marketing Research

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Effective market research, can help determine the need, estimate a product's likelihood to fill it, determine target-market demographics, even define optimal retail locations. This type of information can be uncovered a number of ways: online research, focus groups, even counting competitors' customers. This work can be done by pros, sometimes at signficant cost, or done yourself ("bootstrapped") at a modest investment of time, effort or money.

Marketing Research

What's market research? And why must you do it? Here are two articles that offer a general overview on the topic.

Sources and Techniques for Your Strategic Planning Efforts know your competitors (Inc.com)
Hitting the Market know your potential customers (Inc.com)
Introducing New Products having a successful launch (Inc.com)
High Concept: Tapping a New Market features and distribution for success (Inc.com)

Bootstrapped Research

Some low-budget research strategies:

Market Research on the Cheap students can bootstrap research (Inc.com)
inexpensive market research techniques by Guerrilla marketer Jay Conrad Levinson (Inc.com)
How can I find an affordable market research service? quantitative and qualitative primary research for less (Inc.com)
A Do-It-Yourself Customer Panel (Inc.com)
Will They Bite? Shoe case study (Inc.com)
Every Click They Make data from server logs (Inc.com)

Demographic Research

Develop a thorough knowledge of whom your target market includes.

Grist: Don't Read the Business Pages what the newspaper tells you (Inc.com)
The Six Costliest Mistakes You Can Make in Marketing to Women (Inc.com)
Getting the Dirt on Your Market (Inc.com)
Community Profiles (Stats Canada)
Canadian Census data (Stats Canada)

Competitive Intelligence

Snoop around competitors' stores, websites and customers.

Competitive Intelligence on a Shoestring with online research (Inc.com)
The Dirtbag Demographic clothing case study, using competitors' websites (Inc.com)
Spies Like Us with mystery shoppers (Inc.com)
Get a Local Look at Your Competition many techniques (Inc.com)

Research Woes

CEO insights into market research mistakes

Grandma Got Run Over by Bad Research clothing case study (Inc.com)
John J. Kilcullen: My Biggest Mistake on collecting relevant customer data. (Inc.com)

Carlos Alvarez: My Biggest Mistake beer case study (Inc.com)

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