The Marketing Research Process

There are six main steps in the marketing research process (for a detailed tutorial on the entire marketing research process, click the links below, which were obtained from the Polaris Marketing Research Company website):

1. Identifying and defining your problem (or opportunity)

2. Developing your approach

3. Research design

4. Collecting the data

5. Performing data analysis

6. Reporting and presentation
Source: http://www.polarismr.com/education/steps_index.html(2)

Company information/data is primarily collected and analyzed for use in the first step of the research process: Identifying and defining your problem (or opportunity), which involves the execution of four tasks; through the collection of primary and secondary data from either internal or external sources (see Table 1.1):

Table 1.1 Tasks Involved in Identifying and Defining Your Problem

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_research_process(3)

Furthermore, existing company databases are more utilized in the third task: Secondary data analysis, for conducting marketing research.