When I first became involved in marketing and advertising, everything we did was based on wit and style. Basically, the goal was to come up with the catchiest, most contagious slogans that we could. Everything else was secondary. We did not bother with market research marketing. Our clients wanted slick, young, stylish people to tell them where to throw their money. And they threw lots of it at us all the time.
For better or for worse, the market has changed since then. Advertising and marketing consulting firms are not just required to be brilliant anymore. Instead, we are required to be scientific. You see, in the last 20 years, marketing has reached a crisis situation. People are so disillusioned with consumer culture and so unresponsive to marketing that companies don't know what to do. Commercials get ever more creative and outlandish, and consumers get ever more bored. It isn't that people aren't buying anything – it's just that they're not buying what we tell them to buy anymore. Either they buy what their friends buy, or they stick to old buying habits. Either way, market research marketing is the only solution.
Market research marketing takes many different approaches. The most simple way of doing it is the marketing telephone survey – a strategy that has been around for half a century by now. Basically, by calling consumers up and asking what they think of a product or service, you can find all kinds of useful information that will help you with future marketing campaigns. You can find out who you are reaching, what people like about your service or product, what they don't like about it, and how likely you are to reach them. Then you can use the marketing research to custom tailor your advertising campaign to their particular demographic.
Of course, marketing research jobs get much more complicated than that. At the market research marketing company that I work at, we go all out. We do focus group studies, showing targeted advertisements to small groups of people in particular consumer segments. Carefully, we gauge their reactions to what they are shown and use them to perfect our advertisements. Because we offer consumer incentives, people are more likely to give us their time and energy. We then take the knowledge that we learn from these consumer participation groups and use it to improve the products and the advertisement we put out for them.
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