In this blog, I want to talk about the importance of the Marketing research for a business, but specially the importance of making the right questions in the research. It is essential for a company to make a Marketing research before launching a new product or changing one of their products that already exists, in order to know how the consumers will react towards this and if the idea of this new product is profitable. However, a very usual mistake while doing the research is asking the wrong questions, which can lead the company to misunderstand the results and therefore to make the wrong decisions, which eventually can lead the business to decline.

A very useful example of this fact is the case of Coca Cola in the early 1980`s when Coca Cola`s market share was decreasing and Pepsi`s was rising, consequently, Coca Cola decided to change the formula of their coke and make its taste “smoother”. In order to do it, they made a Marketing research, in which they asked to their consumers how would they feel if the company added a new ingredient to the formula, just to realize that only the 11 percent of the consumers will be angry; by having this research as a guide, the managers decided to launch the new product. As a result, they had a lot of negative reactions from their consumers; what really happened is that they did not do the right question, they asked how the consumers would feel if they added a new ingredient to the formula; when the right question was: “how the consumers would feel if Coca-Cola was replaced with a drink that tasted different”.

We can see with this example how what seems a little and insignificant question can alter a whole Marketing research and therefore make it useless when making the right decision for the company.

For more information about this case please visit the following link:http://www.marketresearchsurveysoftware.com/market-research-and-the-coca-cola-problem/