Before you move into the market research project design, validate the decision problem with those who were interviewed, and others if required. Take them through the results from the informational interviews and confirm that this is the problem to be researched.

As part of this exercise, often multiple problems of opportunities are revealed. This is common but not all problems can be solved with one market research project. As well there are some problems that cannot be solved with market research, and those may be revealed in this process but need to be addressed in a different way.

Business problems such as having a purchasing process that involves too many steps, not paying employees a salary that is comparable in the industry, not having a unique selling point (USP) for your products or service, or selling a low-quality product or service can’t be solved with market research. For example, if you are able to hire staff through innovative and engaging recruitment efforts, but can’t retain staff for more than 12 months, the issue is probably not marketing but challenges within the company culture. Additional marketing to promote open positions won’t lead to retention of staff.

Additionally, there are some marketing problems that cannot be solved with research such as having staff who don’t understand how to write a marketing plan, or using the ‘spray and pray’ method of using one message on all of the platforms.

Taking the time to go through the steps of the identification of the decision problem will support a well-designed market research plan with the goal of finding solutions to the problem.

References

Burnett, J. (Ed.). (2011). Introducing Marketing. Global Text Project.  CC BY 3.0

Kearney, D. B. (2022). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA). CC BY 4.0