Commercial Online Databases: Computerized collections of information available from online commercial sources or via the Internet.
causal research: Marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships.
Customer Insights: Fresh understandings of customers and the marketplace derived from marketing information that become the basis for crating customer value and relationships.
Customer relationship management (CRM): Managing detailed information about individual customers and carefully managing customer "touch points" in order to maximize customer loyalty.
Descriptive Research: Marketing research to better describe marketing problems, situations, or markets, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers.
Ethnograph Research: A form of observational research that involves sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their natural habitat.
Experimental Research: Gathering primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses.
Exploratory Research: Market research to gather preliminary information that will hep define problems and suggest hypotheses.
Focus Group Interviewing: Personal interviewing that involves inviting six to ten people to gather for a few hours with a trained interviewer to talk about a product, service, or organization. The interviewer "focuses" the group discussion on important issues.
Internal databases: Electronic collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company network.
Marketing Information Systems (MIS): People and procedures for assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision makers to use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights.
Marketing intelligence: The systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information about consumers, competitors, and developments in the marketing environment.
marketing research: The systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.
Observational research: Gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations.
online focus group: Gathering a small group of people online with a trained moderator the chat about a product, service, or organization and gain qualitative insights about consumer attitudes and behavior.
online marketing research: Collecting primary data online through Internet surveys, online focus groups, Web-based experiments, or tracking consumers' online behavior.
primary data: Information collected for the specific purpose at hand.
sample: A segment of the population selected for marketing research to represent the population as a whole.
secondary data: Information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose.
survey research: Gathering primary data by asking people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and buying behavior.