Once you get a good feel for the marketplace and any new opportunities or challenges coming from outside the business, it's time to take a look inside with questions like: "Have we added capabilities, skills or knowledge that suggest we serve new markets? Are there capabilities, skills, knowledge or equipment that we need to develop or acquire? Or should we be narrowing our focus to take advantage of specialized skills and services? Have we tried to become everything to everyone? Could we be number one in a niche market?"
If you honestly evaluate both the external and internal influences on your business or product, it becomes easy to develop a marketing mix for success. You will learn what you need to be telling clients and prospects and you will know who that target audience is. You will likely get information that indicates where your marketing and advertising budget should be allocated.
Whatever questions you ask, just be sure to ask them. One tip: If, like most of us, you don't have time for a long client and prospect survey, study what your competition is doing and evaluate what they do that is truly successful (not just everything they do), and look through your own customer records for trends, problems and successes.
Visit www.pinscreative.com to learn more about writer, designer and consultant, Cynthia Pinsonnault. You can also subscribe to Pinsonnault Creative's free monthly "Solutions" newsletter for more leading edge tips and tools for building your brand through effective marketing, graphic design, Web site development and communication: pinscreative.blogspot.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cynthia_Pinsonnault Marketing Research: Know Your Customers
By Otilia Otlacan
Having a competitive advantage over other businesses targeting the same market as yours is a basic, survival must: many choose to develop longterm relationships with their customers, in an attempt to create such competitive advantage. Knowing your customers is crucial, and it is quite a different thing from knowing their buying behavior. It is every marketer's dream to have real, up-to-date information about consumers: their preferences, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, interests, education level, behavior are the base of understanding their needs.
Businesses often employ Marketing research to determine the consumers' degree of acceptance of a new product, and the reason behind this is the fact that launching a new product without a real demand would involve much more costs than actual market research. Plus, a failed product launch is not only damaging for a business' finances but also its image and reputation.
Any marketing research upon consumers' profile should address at least the following questions:
Who makes the market of a product?
A company active on any given market must ask itself who its customers are. Are they mostly young people, or perhaps elderly? Women or men? What would their income levels be? This is the demographic information that can be a starting point in creating a customer profile.
What do people buy?
Is there a certain product consumers seem to prefer? Can we detect a trend of migrating to a given product? Will the market accept new products or changes in existing ones? These questions could offer a perspective on the mechanisms triggering buying decisions; the answers could indicate just how open to changes customers are.
Why do people buy?
Many businesses ignore the reasons why their customers choose one product or another. While we all know that impulse buying is a reality, most purchases are still made on reasons of benefits, value, satisfaction. Hence, we should ask ourselves "Why certain products are more popular among consumers and are perceived as being superior to others?"