Marketing research -- MBA - Essay Example

The classifications of market research are evaluated in four ways, which are purposive market research, secondary and primary market research, qualitative and quantitative market research, business to business, and business to customers’ market research. The purposive market research contains three basic research designs, which are exploratory research, descriptive research, and causal research (Malhotra, 2010). According to its name, the descriptive research is to describe something, usually market characteristics or functions (Malhotra and Birks, 2007).

Descriptive research is often preplanned and structured as the research questions are clearly defined. It is often used to describe the potential size of the market; building consumers’ profiles; measuring consumer perception towards a product or brand; to make specific future predictions, for example, the future sales level for the company (Quee, 1999). Compared to the exploratory research, descriptive research is characterized by the prior setting of specific hypotheses. Furthermore, the descriptive research can be further classified into cross-sectional research and longitudinal research (Malhotra and Birks, 2007).

In the report, the the questions that will be examined are: what are the purposes of using descriptive market research; what are the advantages for the descriptive market research; what are the difficulties that may rise in using descriptive market research? It helps to understand the methodologies of market research as well as to critically analyze the effectiveness of descriptive market research. The purpose of marketing research is described as to “Gain a more detailed understanding of consumers’ needs; reduce the risk of product/business failure and forecast future trends”.

(Tutor2u, 2010) The descriptive market research is primarily focused on the gathering of numeric,