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...of the marketing orientated organisation, whether product or service based, profit or non profit based, is the identification and genuine satisfaction of customers needs and wants, more effectively and efficiently than the competition. The marketing concept has been defined as ‘the key to achieving organisational goals’ and the marketing concept rests on ‘market focus, customer orientation, co-ordinated marketing and profitability’. In a profit making business the firm obviously has to try and achieve this level of customer satisfaction as a way of staying ahead of the competition and making a profit. In a ‘not for profit’ organisation, management substitutes profit for some other criterion such as maximum social benefits; a political party would be likely to substitute maximising votes for financial profit. A university on the other hand may substitute ‘research excellence’, to purely financial profit. In order for organisations to be able to arrange their assets and resources in such a way that they are able to produce ‘bundles of satisfactions’ that satisfy the genuine desires of specifically defined target markets better than the competition, they need to know what the market regards as valuable. The concept of value is subjective and lies in the mind of the individual prospective customer. Hence, in a broad sense, marketing management needs to understand the ‘minds’ of their target markets, their attitudes and value systems. They need a formalised, managerial approach to this most important task. This is the fundamental role of marketing research.
Without the information that marketing research provides, management cannot apply the marketing concept as an overriding business philosophy. It is not the intention to present a comprehensive treatment of marketing research, and indeed it would take an entire textbook to do this. The purpose of this material...
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