Market research is used by companies across the world to find out what area of the market and what country will there product be sold more in to get a better target audiences. so what the companies do is they get questionnaires and do surveys on a small part of the population and see what products there buying and from where. They get some of this information from the internet and from going to houses to find out what types of people will use the product and what locations that it will be used in, cities, towns, villages places like that. They use primary source’s compared to secondary as primary is more reliable as primary research is research you have done yourself compared to secondary which is someone else is work which you don’t know where they got the information from.
The disadvantage of not doing market research is that you are launching your product blind as it were and as a result they would most likely be marketed in the wrong locations, and to the wrong audience’s with this problem the product will have the sales will be low. So you must always do research before you release your product so that you don’t sell it to the wrong audience.
Company’s use both types of data Quantitative and qualitative, which is data made up of numbers which is Quantitative like statistics and other data using number. Compared to qualitative which is questionnaires and forms of text. These both have their advantages in a company like Quantitative is good for gathering numbers to create reports and statistics on a topic by looking at the numbers but with you can look at the opinions compared with just number this allows the company to see the feelings the customers and target audience have.
Media companies across the world use market research from places like the NRS (national readership survey) this research is used to look at and compare different types of households which are put in category’s which are based on income, outgoings and job type A-E to find out which one is more likely to buy the product or use it. Pokemon brand is a hard one due to the survey only is allocated to people 0ver 18 so they must use the information about their parents of younger children, but that isn’t a problem because the parents buy the games so the information is available but you just need to do some more in-depth research which is demographic.