Market research and Internet marketing
Market structures
When market structures changed from being driven by issues of supply to those of demand, taking the initiative by acquiring knowledge of market requirements and preferences became increasingly important to industry.
Originally, objective quantifying processes were used to gauge people’s wishes and demands. Gender, age, income, family status, and consumer habits were compiled and processed using complex statistics and then formed the basis for the development of products and marketing concepts.
Even today, market research based on studies of consumer behavior are the standard in many marketing departments.
Sociometry, or the gauging of human emotions, desires, and behavior, has long been associated with the belief that directing and controlling human wishes and behavior was actually possible. Motivational research and quality-oriented research first appeared in the mid-twentieth century.
Motivational research, headed at the time by Ernest Dichter, was based on a criticism of consumerism and advocated consumer protection. Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, expressed the popular fear that consumers would become the unwilling victims of psychologically manipulative sales and entrapment strategies.
Growing knowledge about the psychological effects of colors and shapes, products and packaging, of different point of sale design strategies, of the potential emotional effect of scents and sounds, and of the theatrics of advertisements triggered fears about manipulative practices in the world of consumer goods and marketing.
Internet marketing
Internet Marketing or you can call it as online advertising that uses Internet technology to advertise the products/services a website offers and make them aware to all Internet surfers. Internet Marketing includes search engine optimization, branding and many forms of advertising. As Internet comes more and more powerful users/webmasters are now using Internet to market their services.
Every potential customers uses the Internet to look after different products online and they always have a choice to buy a product or subscribe to a service which seems to be good and valuable.
Marketing on the internet is what Coaching is all about. Call it Internet Marketing, call it web coaching, call it SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) or call it optimizing your website. But Internet Marketing is what the real world calls advertising. It can take different forms. Most of the internet marketing you see is in the form of direct advertising by sponsored ads, or sponsors.
web-coaches.com
There are many online companies offering Internet marketing related services. One of the best is web-coaches.com.
Let’s go to the next level…
Psychological market
The tremors have long since settled down and qualitative psychological market and motivational research has become an established element of market research and marketing departments. In-depth interviews, focus groups, panel discussions, projective research design, and anthropological observation are basic methods of qualitative psychological marketing and motivational research.
The analysis of social milieus has made the focus-group approach popularly used today by designers and marketers as a point of orientation and means that an emphasis is put on studying consumers’ lives and lifestyles.
Trend research
So-called trend research is also highly regarded in market research, because it is important to try to guess which future developments will influence consumer behavior. Futurology is of course a difficult field, as encapsulated in Niels Bohr’s aphorism: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Nevertheless, future and trend research became important aspects of market research.
Trend scouting, collective oracles, scanning, and screening are some of the routine approaches in trend research. Market research needs to be reevaluated in the light of globalization, individualization, and the spread of comprehensive communication networking which is giving consumers the opportunity to participate in the design of products, while making their behavior less predictable.
Interestingly, this predicament has made intuition an unexpectedly respectable option and clarifying model, precisely where and when the calculations of motivations and behavior elude research. Progress in neurological research is being used to locate intuition and determine the role it plays with the help of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in order to contribute to the newly established field of neuro-marketing.