Role and limitations of marketing research

"Marketing research does not make decisions and it does not guarantee success". Marketing managers may seek advice from marketing research specialists, and indeed it is important that research reports should specify alternative courses of action and the probability of success, where possible, of these alternatives. However, it is marketing managers who make the final marketing decision and not the researcher. The second observation, that marketing research does not guarantee success, is simply a recognition of the environment within which marketing takes place. In the fields of science and engineering researchers are often working with deterministic models of the world where y = f(x). That is, x is a necessary and sufficient condition for y to occur. For instance, an increase in pressure is usually necessary and sufficient to bring about a rise in air temperature. In the social sciences, and this includes marketing and marketing research, the phenomenon under investigation rarely, if ever, lends itself to deterministic modelling. Consider the marketing problem of determining how much to spend on promotion in order to achieve a given market share. The link between promotional expenditure and sales is not so direct as that between pressure and temperature. There are a great many more intervening variables, including: the media used, the effectiveness of the promotional message, the length and frequency of the campaign, not to mention the many dimensions of the product, price and distribution. Marketing researchers work with probabilistic models of the form:

y = f(x₁)..(fx₂)...f(x_n)...

This reflects the fact that in order for a target market share to be reached some promotion (amount unknown) is necessary but will not be sufficient, on its own, to achieve the target. Y is a function of a number of variables and the interactions between them. The model is further complicated by the fact that these interactions are themselves often not understood. It is for these reasons that marketing researchers cannot guarantee that decisions based on their information will always prove 'successful'. Rather the best that a competent researcher and a well designed study will be able to offer is a reduction in the amount of uncertainty surrounding the decision.