Calvin's Blog

I apologize for the delayed post but with the stress of midterms these past two weeks, the blog was the last thing on my mind. But thankfully midterm season is over and I can finally get back on track.

So the other day while finishing up the second marketing assignment about market research, I began thinking about what it be like to actually do this as a full time career. Actually to be honest, I thought more about what it be like to start my own market research firm. I wondered about how the different market research companies out there get themselves noticed by big organizations to be hired by them to help with their marketing strategies.

Do marketing research firms do their own research about things like consumer tastes, market segments, and emerging trends and then sell their findings to the highest bidder? Or are they hired by big companies like coke or nike to help them promote a new product, to attack a new market or enhance their image.

Now that I think about it, I guess a market research company could do both. So if there isn’t a company out there looking to outsource their marketing projects, the firm could always find work by selling their own primary research.

From the second marketing assignment, I found the most tedious part to be administering the survey as our group chose to use the more direct approach and asked participants to fill them out in person. One of the biggest challenges I found was trying to get random people to fill the survey. It’s not the occasional rejection that I found to be somewhat annoying, it was the amount of time it took to have such a small amount to surveys completed. I can understand now how those people, who stand outside various places asking if they can have a moment of your time to tell you about some new product or service, must feel in their everyday work. It’s not easy job and I commend those people for sticking it our even when most of the time people have no interest in talking to them.

Marketing is not always the most glamorous or sexy field of commerce. Like any field, there are areas that require hard physical work. Someone has to be responsible for being out in the field and collecting data first hand or else there would be no point to the whole principle of market research. Its because there are people that go out and find and collect data from consumers that companies have information that results in better development of goods and servives. In the end these goods and services are passed on to the consumers. That’s the whole point of asking them what they think and trying to understand how they buy things. So in my opinion if consumers want to see better products out there for them, then it may be a good idea to take a little bit of time to contribute to the market research that is trying to do just that.

Nonetheless, the idea of market research sparked a great deal of interest in me as I was fascinated with our groups results from the surveys and saw different trends and patterns in the data.

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