Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.
Concept testing is the process of using surveys to evaluate consumer acceptance of a new product idea prior to the introduction of a product to the market. It is important not to confuse concept testing with advertising testing, brand testing and packaging testing, as is sometimes done. Concept testing focuses on the basic product idea, without the embellishments and puffery inherent in advertising.
The theory of consumer choice is the branch of microeconomics that relates preferences to consumption expenditures and to consumer demand curves. It analyzes how consumers maximize the desirability of their consumption, by maximizing utility subject to a consumer budget constraint. Factors influencing consumers' evaluation of the utility of goods include: income level, cultural factors, product information and physio-psychological factors.
In marketing, market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers based on shared characteristics.
Brand equity, in marketing, is the worth of a brand in and of itself – i.e., the social value of a well-known brand name. The owner of a well-known brand name can generate more revenue simply from brand recognition, as consumers perceive the products of well-known brands as better than those of lesser-known brands.
In the social sciences, scaling is the process of measuring or ordering entities with respect to quantitative attributes or traits. For example, a scaling technique might involve estimating individuals' levels of extraversion, or the perceived quality of products. Certain methods of scaling permit estimation of magnitudes on a continuum, while other methods provide only for relative ordering of the entities.
As part of consumer behavior, the buying decision process is the decision-making process used by consumers regarding the market transactions before, during, and after the purchase of a good or service. It can be seen as a particular form of a cost–benefit analysis in the presence of multiple alternatives.
Kansei engineering aims at the development or improvement of products and services by translating the customer's psychological feelings and needs into the domain of product design. It was founded by Mitsuo Nagamachi, Professor Emeritus of Hiroshima University. Kansei engineering parametrically links the customer's emotional responses to the properties and characteristics of a product or service. In consequence, products can be designed to bring forward the intended feeling.
Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Customer analytics is a process by which data from customer behavior is used to help make key business decisions via market segmentation and predictive analytics. This information is used by businesses for direct marketing, site selection, and customer relationship management. Marketing provides services in order to satisfy customers. With that in mind, the productive system is considered from its beginning at the production level, to the end of the cycle at the consumer. Customer analytics plays an important role in the prediction of customer behavior.
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model. Brand awareness is a key consideration in consumer behavior, advertising management, and brand management. The consumer's ability to recognize or recall a brand is central to purchasing decision-making. Purchasing cannot proceed unless a consumer is first aware of a product category and a brand within that category. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but they must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for purchasing to proceed. Creating brand awareness is the main step in advertising a new product or bringing back the older brand in light.
Choice modelling attempts to model the decision process of an individual or segment via revealed preferences or stated preferences made in a particular context or contexts. Typically, it attempts to use discrete choices in order to infer positions of the items on some relevant latent scale. Indeed many alternative models exist in econometrics, marketing, sociometrics and other fields, including utility maximization, optimization applied to consumer theory, and a plethora of other identification strategies which may be more or less accurate depending on the data, sample, hypothesis and the particular decision being modelled. In addition, choice modelling is regarded as the most suitable method for estimating consumers' willingness to pay for quality improvements in multiple dimensions.
Sawtooth Software, Inc. is a computer software company based in Provo, Utah, United States. The company provides survey software tools, and specializes in conjoint analysis.
Multivariate landing page optimization (MVLPO) is a specific form of landing page optimization where multiple variations of visual elements on a webpage are evaluated. For example, a given page may have k choices for the title, m choices for the featured image or graphic, and n choices for the company logo. This example yields k×m×n landing page configurations.
Best–worst scaling (BWS) techniques involve choice modelling and were invented by Jordan Louviere in 1987 while on the faculty at the University of Alberta. In general with BWS, survey respondents are shown a subset of items from a master list and are asked to indicate the best and worst items. The task is repeated a number of times, varying the particular subset of items in a systematic way, typically according to a statistical design. Analysis is typically conducted, as with DCEs more generally, assuming that respondents makes choices according to a random utility model (RUM). RUMs assume that an estimate of how much a respondent prefers item A over item B is provided by how often item A is chosen over item B in repeated choices. Thus, choice frequencies estimate the utilities on the relevant latent scale. BWS essentially aims to provide more choice information at the lower end of this scale without having to ask additional questions that are specific to lower ranked items.
Marketing engineering is currently defined as "a systematic approach to harness data and knowledge to drive effective marketing decision making and implementation through a technology-enabled and model-supported decision process".
Psychographic segmentation has been used in marketing research as a form of market segmentation which divides consumers into sub-groups based on shared psychological characteristics, including subconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, and priorities to explain and predict consumer behavior. Developed in the 1970s, it applies behavioral and social sciences to explore to understand consumers’ decision-making processes, consumer attitudes, values, personalities, lifestyles, and communication preferences. It complements demographic and socioeconomic segmentation, and enables marketers to target audiences with messaging to market brands, products or services. Some consider lifestyle segmentation to be interchangeable with psychographic segmentation, marketing experts argue that lifestyle relates specifically to overt behaviors while psychographics relate to consumers' cognitive style, which is based on their "patterns of thinking, feeling and perceiving".
SIMALTO – SImultaneous Multi-Attribute Trade Off – is a survey based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people prioritise and value alternative product and/or service options of the attributes that make up individual products or services.
