Introduction

Market research is a process of gathering information to determine the needs, wants, or behaviors of consumers or customers. Market research is used in many different industries to gather data about what consumers want and how they will respond to new products.

There are different types of market research that can be used to gather information about your target audience. This article will cover some of the most common terms you might hear when conducting market research.

1. Agile Market Research: Agile market research is a process that combines qualitative and quantitative data to get a better understanding of customer behavior. It does this by learning more about customers’ needs, wants, and behaviors through in-person interviews, surveys, focus groups, and other methods. Agile market research also includes one-on-one interviews with customers who haven’t yet purchased your product or service. The goal of agile market research is to understand how customers feel about your product or service and what you can do better to meet their needs.

2. Cost Per Complete: Cost per complete refers to the cost of an experiment divided by its return on investment (ROI). For example, if an experiment costs $100 but returns $50 in sales for every dollar spent on it, then it’s considered a good investment for a company looking for new ways to increase profits.

3. Control Group: A control group is a group of people who receive some form of treatment (treatment group) but don’t receive any treatment at all (control group). The control group provides researchers with valuable information about how much difference treatment makes when compared to no treatment at all—or how effective different treatments are when compared to each other.

4. Consumer Insights: Consumer insights are what you collect from your customers’ demographics, buying habits, and lifestyle preferences (like social media use). This information can help you determine whether or not your regular customers would buy your product too—and if so, when they might want to buy it.

5. Data Cleaning: Data cleaning refers to removing any data points that aren’t directly related to what you’re studying—for example, removing numbers from a report if they’re not relevant to its topic. This helps ensure that your study isn’t biased by extraneous information that doesn’t relate back to whatever question you intended to ask.

6. Device ID: Device ID is the unique identification number that all devices have, including tablets and smartphones, for example. It’s important to know this because it helps you identify a device when you’re in the field.

7. DIY Market Research: DIY market research is a great way to conduct your own research because all you need to do is go out and talk to people. This can be done in person or over the phone or via social media, which means you don’t need any special equipment or software.

8. Drop-Offs: A drop-off involves dropping off surveys at a location where people will fill them out, such as a restaurant or coffee shop. You can also do this online via email or other platforms.

9. Engagement: Engagement refers to how many times a survey has been filled out by different people with different devices on different days throughout the week/month/year (so long as it doesn’t change within 24 hours). This helps researchers get a better idea of how many people are actually interested in their product or service before they launch it publicly and start receiving feedback from potential customers.

10. Feasibility Study: A feasibility study is a preliminary analysis of a project or product to determine its ability to be successfully implemented. The analysis focuses on the technical, legal, financial, and organizational issues involved in implementing an idea into reality. It helps identify any barriers that might prevent the successful implementation of the project or product.

11. Fielding: Fielding is when you ask someone a question and they respond with an answer that shows how they feel about something. It can be used as part of qualitative research to get a general sense of what people think about various topics. Fielding can also be used in quantitative research to get an estimate of how likely someone would be to respond based on their past behavior.

12. Implicit Data: Implicit data refers to information that is available but not directly collected for analysis. For example, if you are researching social media posts about your brand’s new product launch and you find posts by people mentioning it but do not have any way of knowing whether they’ve actually purchased it yet, those posts will be implicit data. Or when someone says “I like chocolate,” they may not realize that this could be due to their love of chocolate ice cream or simply because they enjoy eating chocolate-flavored foods regularly without knowing why they do so (i.e., implicit). Implicit data can be collected through surveys or interviews where respondents are asked questions related to products.

13. Incidence Rate: The number of people who are aware of something such as your product and services at a point in time.

14. Longitudinal Research: A research method where the same survey is repeated over time to see if attitudes, behaviors, or preferences have changed over time.

15. Margin of Error: A measure used to determine whether the results of a survey are accurate. It tells you what proportion of people answered a question correctly and what proportion answered incorrectly.

16. Market Research: A form of social science that involves the study and analysis of the behavior and attitudes of individuals, groups, institutions, and societies in order to gain insight into how individuals make decisions regarding their purchase behavior; this term also refers specifically to qualitative research methods used in marketing studies (e.g., case studies).

17. Mobile ID: A mobile ID is a unique identifier for a phone, device, app, or other types of mobile communication device. The mobile ID allows companies to identify a user’s location and/or activity on their platform.

18. Non-Probability Sampling: Non-probability sampling means that a sample comes from an unrepresentative population and does not have an equal probability of selection from all members of that population. This can be done through internet panels, email lists, phone calls, or even by randomly selecting people at bus stops. For example, if you want to know what percent of people aged 30-40 who live in San Francisco think about organic food and drink, you would need 100 people in that age range who live in San Francisco. You could ask 100 people, but they may not all respond due to various reasons (e.g., they don’t like organic food). This type of sampling is more likely to yield accurate results than random sampling because it eliminates bias from sample selection bias.

19. Online Panel: An online panel is a group of users who are invited to participate in an online survey by providing their email addresses and agreeing to receive future emails from the company. Online panels are often used when there is too much interest in the subject matter to receive enough responses via traditional methods such as mail surveys or telephone interviews.

20. Panel: A panel is a group of people who respond to surveys over time or across multiple surveys as opposed to being interviewed individually within a single study period.

21. Piping: This refers to the technique used for interviewing respondents, especially when you have a large pool of potential respondents. You can pipe your respondents through a series of questions so that you get an idea of what their responses will be, without them having time to think about it. This is especially useful if you’re trying to ask questions on the spot or if you’re in a rush.

22. Population: Population refers to the total number of people in a particular population or subgroup. In market research, population can refer to an entire country or region; it can also refer to a specific demographic group like age, gender, or religion.

23. Primary Data: Primary data are the original source of information collected by researchers; they are usually obtained from surveys and focus groups or through interviews with key informants. Primary data is generally used when there is no other way to get information about your target audience’s needs and wants.

24. Primary Research: Primary research is a type of research that uses original sources such as primary data, secondary data (such as news articles), and expert opinion as sources for knowledge generation activities such as literature reviews and case studies. Primary research helps you understand how people think about your topic in order for you to create effective marketing messages that resonate with potential customers.

25. Probability Sampling: Probability sampling refers to selecting respondents from a random sample of individuals without regard to their characteristics (like age or gender), which allows researchers to select a random sample from a larger population without knowing how many members of that population there are (or how many members there aren’t).

26. Psychographic: This refers to identifying and understanding the different personality types of your target audience. It’s usually done by analyzing data collected from surveys and other sources like social media posts or web content.

27. Public Opinion Research (POR): POR involves polling people in order to find out what they think about something—such as whether they would vote for a certain candidate or not. The goal here is to get an accurate representation of public opinion so that marketing campaigns can make informed decisions based on those findings.

28. Qualification rate: This refers to the percentage of eligible respondents who are actually contacted for participation in market research.

29. Qualitative research: Qualitative research is based on a group of people who are asked questions that explore their opinions and perspectives on a subject. It can be used to gain an understanding of consumer behavior, preferences, and feelings about products and services. The most common qualitative research method is focus groups, where participants come together to discuss topics of interest.

30. Quantitative research: Quantitative research involves gathering quantitative data from samples of respondents using questionnaires or interviews. The data gathered from these surveys can be used for market analysis, determining price points for products/services, or determining how many people would like a product/service at various price points.

31. Questionnaire: Questionnaire is an instrument used for survey purposes. It is a written questionnaire that contains questions pertaining to one or more variables of interest (e.g., demographic characteristics such as age). The respondent answers each question by selecting one option from among pre-established choices (e.g., yes/no)

32. Quota: A quota is an amount of information that must be provided by respondents before they can be considered for inclusion in a study. It’s typically used when conducting qualitative studies because it helps ensure that enough people are involved in each round of interviews/focus groups so that you don’t have data from only one person who might not represent the opinions of everyone else there.

33. Respondent: This is the person that you are trying to reach with your questionnaire or interview. It can also refer to respondents who have already been interviewed or surveyed by someone else, like an analyst or researcher at a company who has conducted data collection on their own.

34. Response Rate: The response rate measures how many people responded to one particular question in a survey or interview, based on how many people were asked about that topic and how many gave responses about it. Ideally, you want a high response rate for every question for researchers and marketing professionals to get accurate results from their surveys and interviews.

35. Sample: A sample is a portion of your population that you study and analyze. A sample might include just one person, or it could include several hundred people. It’s important to know what type of sample size is appropriate for your project before you start collecting data.

36. Sample size: Sample size is the number of respondents needed to accurately represent the general population from whom data was collected. If there are 3 items on a list (an example), then each sample would have 6 observations (3×2). This means that for each observation in the sample, there would be one occurrence from each possible subset.

37. Secondary data: Secondary data refers to any information that has been collected by someone other than you (or your company) such as public records or media reports. In some cases, secondary data can be used in conjunction with first-hand experience to calculate something new like an opinion poll or demographic breakdowns based on surveys conducted by third parties who may have access to different sources of information than you do.

38. Secondary research: Secondary research is a type of research where researchers learn about their subject by looking at other sources like blogs and books, that cover similar topics but aren’t directly related to the topic being researched.

39. Segmentation: This refers to the process of dividing a large group of people into smaller groups based on their characteristics. It’s used in market research to find out what kinds of people buy certain products or services, and then target those customers specifically for your products or services.

40. Statistical significance: You can’t use statistical significance in market research without first doing a survey, but once you do that, it becomes easier to come up with statistically significant results. When evaluating your data using statistical techniques like ANOVA and regression analysis, it’s important that you check for statistical significance using techniques like t-tests before starting any analyses so that you have a better idea of whether there are significant differences between groups or between variables within groups.

41. Survey: A survey is an attempt by researchers to get responses from people about their opinions or experiences related to a specific topic. The goal is usually to find out how many people agree/disagree with some statement or action.

42. Targeting: Targeting is how you choose who will respond to your survey or interview questions. In marketing cases, this can mean choosing which customers you want to target and why they should respond.

43. Tracking Study (Tracker): A tracking study is used to collect data about customers who have been contacted by a marketing campaign. The goal of the tracking study is to understand how well a marketing campaign performed and what kind of results can be expected from it. Tracking studies are usually conducted by an outside company hired by the company being studied. The data collected during the study usually includes demographics, behaviors, interests, and opinions on products or services.

Conclusion

Market research is all about getting the information you need to make informed decisions. And while there are a ton of terms in the world of market research that can be confusing, the most important thing to know is that market research terminologies are a necessary part of the process of understanding data, and knowing the right ones can make all the difference in how you use your research to make informed decisions.