Do not underestimate Market Research

Often we see a product that is thrown into the market does not respond well by the community. There are also products that have led the market, but because it was too late to anticipate the changes, the company eroded by new competitors. This is because many of our entrepreneurs are generally still rarely do market research.

Core concept of marketing is actually the identification of consumer needs, which in turn created and developed a product / service and then are matched with customer needs appropriately. This process must take place continuously, because the consumer market and it continues to beruabah and growing. This is what underlies the importance of the Research and Development.

How does the R & D understand consumers' needs appropriately? Obviously necessary scientific analysis tools, which can be accounted for both phases, methodology, data acquisition, and the results are scientifically as well. One area of applied science that combines marketing knowledge with the methodology of this research is market research.

Marketing Research is not a monopoly of market participants alone, currently the market research also needs to spread to non-profit organization also even political parties. As in the elections, several candidates for local leaders and political parties grabbed victory through market information. So that personal branding is built, the theme is removed, and the approach undertaken appropriate campaign.

In the business world itself we can take the example of successful motor matic. Why matic motor so booming in Indonesia? Because research shows that many of the women who toil and lazy ride motorcycles with a troublesome tooth gears. Even after product launch, it turns out the man-too much like him.

Try to compare it with our entrepreneurs. Moreover, who still lay with the world of research-research or marketing world. Once they find the 'bright idea', without doing their market research directly realize their ideas. Problems appropriate or not in accordance with the needs of the consumer's case nantilah.

What's worse, it did not use research, directly produced on a large scale without testing it first. The reason is very classic, so cepet profit. Consequently no profit in the can but instead received stump. If this is so important, why many employers are reluctant to do market research? The answer is simple, lazy and complicated to be done.

Because make no mistake, not just new products that you need to research. Determining the right price, choose where your product will be on display, advertising media that is relevant, until the color of packaging products also need to be researched. So, do not be surprised if the process of launching a new product can take a very long time. Here are 3 methods of marketing research are wont to do:

1. Questionnaire.

Marketing research questionnaire method can be done with paper surveys (interviews) or online. In general, the questionnaire is more likely to be answered if there is incentive (ie reward). Suppose that when McDonald's wanted to launch the 'ice cream cone', after the interview, the respondents are given rewards for 20ribu and given gifts.

2. Survey.

Shorter than the questionnaire survey. Surveys online will get a tremendous response if your method of marketing research in an interesting suguhkan. Through your website, you can enter a few questions (which is simple and easy to answer) to obtain comments and suggestions from web site visitors, especially shoppers. However, keep in mind! marketing research method using a telephone survey could be a terror for those who were eating quietly or nap.

3. FGD (Focus Group Discussion)

Focus group is a method of marketing research by using a small group of consumers is collected under the direction of a moderator, while the researchers recorded and record their observations on the response, reaction, and customer comments. Participants are usually paid for their time.

In the past I've FGD about Pantene products, ten respondents with one moderator and three researchers quite effective for this market research methods. But be careful if using this method of marketing research, the answers obtained from respondents are often biased and less representative.

So, before you create and launch the product, use market research methods to prevent failures. Once you have obtained the conclusion of the research, test and measurement used in small scale. The goal is that you know that the product is really ready to be thrown into the market. And no less important to monitor the market's progress is not too late for you to anticipate changes.

MARKET

A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby businesses sell their goods, services and labor to people in exchange for money. Goods and services are sold using a legal tender such as fiat money. This activity forms part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange items. Competition is essential in markets, and separates market from trade. Two persons may trade, but it takes at least three persons to have a market, so that there is competition on at least one of its two sides.^[1] Markets vary in size, range, geographic scale, location, types and variety of human communities, as well as the types of goods and services traded. Some examples include local farmers' markets held in town squares or parking lots, shopping centers and shopping malls, international currency and commodity markets, legally created markets such as for pollution permits, and illegal markets such as the market for illicit drugs.

In mainstream economics, the concept of a market is any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information. The exchange of goods or services for money is a transaction. Market participants consist of all the buyers and sellers of a good who influence its price. This influence is a major study of economics and has given rise to several theories and models concerning the basic market forces of supply and demand. There are two roles in markets, buyers and sellers. The market facilitates trade and enables the distribution and allocation of resources in a society. Markets allow any tradable item to be evaluated and priced. A market emerges more or less spontaneously or is constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange of rights (cf. ownership) of services and goods.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which is a French word meaning "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response to a perceived opportunity. The most obvious form of entrepreneurship is that of starting new businesses (referred as Startup Company); however, in recent years, the term has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activity. When entrepreneurship is describing activities within a firm or large organization it is referred to as intra-preneurship and may include corporate venturing, when large entities spin-off organizations.

According to Paul Reynolds, entrepreneurship scholar and creator of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, "by the time they reach their retirement years, half of all working men in the United States probably have a period of self-employment of one or more years; one in four may have engaged in self-employment for six or more years. Participating in a new business creation is a common activity among U.S. workers over their course of their careers." And in recent years has been documented by scholars such as David Audretsch to be a major driver of economic growth in both the United States and Western Europe.

Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started. Entrepreneurship ranges in scale from solo projects (even involving the entrepreneur only part-time) to major undertakings creating many job opportunities. Many "high value" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding (seed money) in order to raise capital to build the business. Angel investors generally seek annualized returns of 20-30% and more, as well as extensive involvement in the business. Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. In more recent times, the term entrepreneurship has been extended to include elements not related necessarily to business formation activity such as conceptualizations of entrepreneurship as a specific mindset (see also entrepreneurial mindset) resulting in entrepreneurial initiatives e.g. in the form of social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, or knowledge entrepreneurship have emerged.

SEGMENTATION, TARGETTING and POSITIONING

Companies offering their products to the general public. However, to gain maximum benefit market companies must choose what they want to serve.

A market consist of large indentifiable froup Within a market, with similar wants, purchasing power, geographical location, buying Attitudes, or buying habbits. Once the firm has Identified its market segment opportunities, is is ready to initiate market targeting. Here, marketers ecaluate EACH segment to determint how many and the which ones to target and enter.

Segmenting the market is the process of classifying certain categories bedasarkan. By segmenting your market you cans better match supply and demand. Segmenting based on geography, demographics, income level, psychographic, behavioral, user stats, levels of consumer, and customer loyalty status.
Targeting is the process of evaluating each segments attractiveness and selecting one or more characteristics to be served. In this process, companies considering whether to choose the mass segment, several segments, small segments, and segments are very small. Factors to consider in choosing a segment of the company's resources, variations in the company's products, product life cycle stage, market and strategy variations pesai.

After selecting a market segment, the next step should be done by the company is positioning. Positioning is how marketers influence customer's perceptions of a product on the service. The purpose of positioning that can be selected by the company, namely to strengthen and expand the company's current position, create a new position that has not been made by other companies, repositioned in the competition, and create exclusivity.

Decision theory

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Decision theory in economics, philosophy, mathematics and statistics is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision, its rationality, and the resulting optimal decision. It is very closely related to the field of game theory.

Normative and descriptive decision theory

Most of decision theory is normative or prescriptive, i.e., it is concerned with identifying the best decision to take, assuming an ideal decision maker who is fully informed, able to compute with perfect accuracy, and fully rational. The practical application of this prescriptive approach (how people actually make decisions) is called decision analysis, and aimed at finding tools, methodologies and software to help people make better decisions. The most systematic and comprehensive software tools developed in this way are called decision support systems.

Since people usually do not behave in ways consistent with axiomatic rules, often their own, leading to violations of optimality, there is a related area of study, called a positive or descriptive discipline, attempting to describe what people will actually do. Since the normative, optimal decision often creates hypotheses for testing against actual behaviour, the two fields are closely linked. Furthermore it is possible to relax the assumptions of perfect information, rationality and so forth in various ways, and produce a series of different prescriptions or predictions about behaviour, allowing for further tests of the kind of decision-making that occurs in practice.

What kinds of decisions need a theory?

Choice under uncertainty

This area represents the heart of decision theory. The procedure now referred to as expected value was known from the 17th century. Blaise Pascal invoked it in his famous wager (see below), which is contained in his Pensées, published in 1670. The idea of expected value is that, when faced with a number of actions, each of which could give rise to more than one possible outcome with different probabilities, the rational procedure is to identify all possible outcomes, determine their values (positive or negative) and the probabilities that will result from each course of action, and multiply the two to give an expected value. The action to be chosen should be the one that gives rise to the highest total expected value. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli published an influential paper entitled Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk, in which he uses the St. Petersburg paradox to show that expected value theory must be normatively wrong. He also gives an example in which a Dutch merchant is trying to decide whether to insure a cargo being sent from Amsterdam to St Petersburg in winter, when it is known that there is a 5% chance that the ship and cargo will be lost. In his solution, he defines a utility function and computes expected utility rather than expected financial value.

In the 20th century, interest was reignited by Abraham Wald's 1939 paper^[1] pointing out that the two central concerns of orthodox statistical theory at that time, namely statistical hypothesis testing and statistical estimation theory, could both be regarded as particular special cases of the more general decision problem. This paper introduced much of the mental landscape of modern decision theory, including loss functions, risk functions, admissible decision rules, a priori distributions, Bayes decision rules, and minimax decision rules. The phrase "decision theory" itself was first used in 1950 by E. L. Lehmann.^{[citation needed]}

The rise of subjective probability theory, from the work of Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, Leonard Savage and others, extended the scope of expected utility theory to situations where only subjective probabilities are available. At this time it was generally assumed in economics that people behave as rational agents and thus expected utility theory also provided a theory of actual human decision-making behaviour under risk. The work of Maurice Allais and Daniel Ellsberg showed that this was clearly not so. The prospect theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky placed behavioural economics on a more evidence-based footing. It emphasized that in actual human (as opposed to normatively correct) decision-making "losses loom larger than gains", people are more focused on changes in their utility states than the states themselves and estimation of subjective probabilities is severely biased by anchoring.

Castagnoli and LiCalzi (1996),^{[citation needed]} Bordley and LiCalzi (2000)^{[citation needed]} recently showed that maximizing expected utility is mathematically equivalent to maximizing the probability that the uncertain consequences of a decision are preferable to an uncertain benchmark (e.g., the probability that a mutual fund strategy outperforms the S&P 500 or that a firm outperforms the uncertain future performance of a major competitor.). This reinterpretation relates to psychological work suggesting that individuals have fuzzy aspiration levels (Lopes & Oden),^{[citation needed]} which may vary from choice context to choice context. Hence it shifts the focus from utility to the individual's uncertain reference point.

Pascal's Wager is a classic example of a choice under uncertainty. The uncertainty, according to Pascal, is whether or not God exists. Belief or non-belief in God is the choice to be made. However, the reward for belief in God if God actually does exist is infinite. Therefore, however small the probability of God's existence, the expected value of belief exceeds that of non-belief, so it is better to believe in God. (There are several criticisms of the argument.)

Intertemporal choice

This area is concerned with the kind of choice where different actions lead to outcomes that are realised at different points in time. If someone received a windfall of several thousand dollars, they could spend it on an expensive holiday, giving them immediate pleasure, or they could invest it in a pension scheme, giving them an income at some time in the future. What is the optimal thing to do? The answer depends partly on factors such as the expected rates of interest and inflation, the person's life expectancy, and their confidence in the pensions industry. However even with all those factors taken into account, human behavior again deviates greatly from the predictions of prescriptive decision theory, leading to alternative models in which, for example, objective interest rates are replaced by subjective discount rates.

[edit] Competing decision makers

Some decisions are difficult because of the need to take into account how other people in the situation will respond to the decision that is taken. The analysis of such social decisions is more often treated under the label of game theory, rather than decision theory, though it involves the same mathematical methods. From the standpoint of game theory most of the problems treated in decision theory are one-player games (or the one player is viewed as playing against an impersonal background situation). In the emerging socio-cognitive engineering the research is especially focused on the different types of distributed decision-making in human organizations, in normal and abnormal/emergency/crisis situations.

The signal detection theory is based on the Decision theory.

Complex decisions

Other areas of decision theory are concerned with decisions that are difficult simply because of their complexity, or the complexity of the organization that has to make them. In such cases the issue is not the deviation between real and optimal behaviour, but the difficulty of determining the optimal behaviour in the first place. The Club of Rome, for example, developed a model of economic growth and resource usage that helps politicians make real-life decisions in complex situations^{[citation needed]}.

Paradox of choice

Observed in many cases is the paradox that more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all. It is sometimes theorized to be caused by analysis paralysis, real or perceived, or perhaps from rational ignorance. A number of researchers including Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper have published studies on this phenomenon.^[2] This analysis was popularized by Barry Schwartz in his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice.

Statistical decision theory

Several statistical tools and methods are available to organize evidence, evaluate risks, and aid in decision making. The risks of Type I and type II errors can be quantified (estimated probability, cost, expected value, etc.) and rational decision making is improved.

One example shows a structure for deciding guilt in a criminal trial:

		Actual condition
		Guilty	Not guilty
Decision	Verdict of 'guilty'	True Positive	False Positive (i.e. guilt reported unfairly) Type I error
	Verdict of 'not guilty'	False Negative (i.e. guilt not detected) Type II error	True Negative