CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1            BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Marketing managers often commission formal marketing studies of specific problems and opportunities. They may request a market survey, a product preference test, a sales forecast by region, or an advertising evaluation. It is the job of the marketing researcher to produce insight into the customer’s attitudes and buying behaviour. Kotler and Keller(2006)

Marketing research department play crucial roles within the organization especially when it comes to gathering and dissemination of vital information that would in the overall be of immense assistance to the marketing goals and objective of the organization.

According to Abu Zekeri(2008), It is very important to note that marketing embraces different activities such as: finding out what consumers needs and wants are, planning and developing suitable products or service that will satisfy those needs and wants, determining the best wayto price, promote and distribute the want and satisfying product or service without hurting the organization.Marketing research is very needful for us to carry outthese activities.

Marketing mix elements has several activities or decisions to be made under it. These decisions are product decisions, pricing decisions, distribution decisions and promotion decisions, this decisions could be effectively made with the aid of authenticate information which could only be gotten from marketing research.

An important task of marketing research is to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing activities. According to Kotler and Keller(2006), there are complimentary approaches to measure marketing productivity, they are; marketing metrics to access marketing effect and marketing mix modeling to estimate causal relationship and how marketing activity affects outcome. Further discussions in the course of this project willgive us clear insight to the approaches to measure marketing productivity. Marketers frequently asked questions that warrants the need to imbibe the use of  an effective marketing research to answer these questions. Questions such as:

(1)   How can we spot and choose the right market segments?

(2)   How can we differentiate our offering?

(3)   How should we respond to customers who buy on price?

(4)   How can we compete against lower-cost, lower- price competitors

(5)   How can we grow our business?

(6)   How can we build stronger brands?

(7)   How can we keep our customers loyal?

(8)   How can we measure the payback from advertising, sales, promotion and public relations

All the above questions are culled from Kotler and Keller (2006).

Market Share is an indicator of the success of a company’s marketing policy, the company that has the largest share for a geographical market is said to be the market leader in that market, the importance companies attach to market share varies accordingly to business culture. In UnitedState of America (USA), Canada and many European countries, companies tend to focus on profit although market share is a key factor to determinant of profit. In Japan on the other hand market share can be more important than profit. Encarta ® 2009.

According to Kotler and Keller(2006) company sales do not reveal how well the company is performing relative to competitors. For this purpose, marketing management needs to track its market share.

However, market share is the proportion of total sales of a product or type of product by a company in a given market.It can be calculated in terms of value or units sold. Encarta ® 2009.Further discussions in the course of this project work will reveal in detail the relationship between marketing research and market share as well as the role of marketing research in gaining market share.         

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