What is Market Research?

The roles are changing and marketing researchers are becoming more involved in decision making, whereas marketing managers are becoming more involved with research.

The role of marketing research in managerial decision making is explained further using the framework of the DECIDE model.

Although, this type of information would have been termed "commercial intelligence" at the time, it created a precedent for the systemic collection of marketing information.

International traders began to demand information that could be used for marketing decisions. During this period, Daniel Defoe, a London merchant, published information on trade and economic resources of England and Scotland.

In 1911 Charles Coolidge Parlin was appointed as the Manager of the Commercial Research Division of the Advertising Department of the Curtis Publishing Company, thereby establishing the first in-house market research department - an event that has been described as marking the beginnings of organised marketing research

By the 1930s, market researchers such as Ernest Dichter recognised that demographics alone were insufficient to explain different marketing behaviours and began exploring the use of lifestyles, attitudes, values, beliefs and culture to segment markets.

In the first three decades of the 20th-century, advertising agencies and marketing departments developed the basic techniques used in quantitative and qualitative research - survey methods, questionnaires, gallup polls etc.