It's not uncommon to hear the opinion that marketing is just theory and doesn't work in the real world. Millions of entrepreneurs complain about marketing inefficiency every day. They also complain about in-house marketers and marketing consultants, who once again came up with a set of beautiful-sounding phrases and sentences at the presentation. However, in life, the goods and services of companies did not advance one iota after that.
Why marketing experiments are needed
The reason for the situation described at the beginning is extremely simple. All decisions made to change and modernize market policy should be subject to elementary testing in practice, and not the subsequent test of time. Marketing without results is a waste of money and time, the basic building blocks of any business. Marketing should provide stable and constantly increasing sales, it is for this purpose that marketers conduct their experiments.
Experiment in marketing is a method of collecting primary data through the active participation of researchers in a number of consumerprocesses. The experiment in this case establishes relationships between certain events, looking for causal relationships. Another task of such an experiment is to study the influence of one factor in the form of an independent variable on another factor (dependent variable). Other factors are discarded and controlled for the purity of the interaction of the studied factors.
Pros of doing experiments
As one of the most objective types of research, marketing experiments help to find working solutions for the real market. It is noteworthy that it is experiments and the resulting empirical data that are given priority in many scientific and technical disciplines, including medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.
The benefits of experimentation in marketing are as follows:
- Reduce risks for management personnel. During the experiment itself, marketing theories are tested and the best ways to solve problems are selected.
- This method has the highest objectivity in marketing of all available types of research.
- Identification of causal relationships and the nature of these relationships for two independent or ambiguously dependent events at first glance.
Disadvantages of Marketing Experiments
Often the defining disadvantage of such studies is their high cost and time-consuming to conduct. Lack of understanding of the market canlead to large losses and costs.
In marketing, an experiment is always a study of key factors and relationships between variables, revealing the complex nature of the interaction of these variables with each other. Mistakenly operating with minor factors instead of key ones, looking for relationships between insignificant variables is a costly mistake both financially and in terms of time.
The problems described above sometimes lead to disappointing conclusions that the results of the study can only be applied to one of the conditions in which it was conducted. The use of this model in practice under other changing conditions becomes impossible, and such a study is recognized as biased.
Another common problem with an experiment in marketing research, experts call the banal obsolescence of the data obtained. This happens when there is a long period of time between experimentation and practical application in business.
Market Research Terms
Modern experts usually distinguish two types of experiments in marketing, depending on the conditions. The first type is laboratory research, and the second is field research. In addition, field experiments are often called trial (test marketing). It is the last subspecies of research in marketing that is the most costly and complex.
Many companies prefer to limit themselves to laboratory experiments with the possibility of direct permanent control over the process andall factors during the implementation. Complex studies can be considered the highest quality, in which both laboratory and field experiments are carried out in order to obtain the most objective assessment.
Marketing experiments in laboratories
Laboratory experiments in marketing are research conducted in artificially created conditions. Creating such conditions eliminates one of the main problems - interfering extraneous factors or side variables that can violate the desired causal relationships.
The high efficiency of such experiments is noted in some cases. For example, this type of research is often used when evaluating the opinion of buyers about specific types of advertising or tracking response to advertising exposure. Used by companies when selecting the most effective advertising methods for a specific target audience (by age, gender or social class).
Marketing experiments in the fields
Field experiments in marketing are real-life research. Deservedly considered more objective for the real world than "sterile" laboratory testing. They are often carried out directly in stores, on the street or at the home of potential consumers. The latter may mean watching ads on TV or listening to the radio.
As a rule, such studies cover the scale of one or more cities. Marketers also callthese experiments are tests of the market, because the experimental activities are aimed at really working and functioning markets.
Testing markets, in turn, are divided into standard, electronic, simulation and controlled.
Problems that are usually solved by conducting an experiment
A wide range of problems can be solved through market research and observation. The experiment is applied when working with many tasks:
- When comparing the performance of several advertising channels.
- In the process of finding the best price for a product that is just entering the market.
- When deciding to expand the current range on the market, develop promotions and discounts for customers.
- To analyze and compare the performance of competing products and companies.
- When choosing the optimal working schedule for points of sale, including finding the best time to start and end the working day, as well as confirming (or refuting) the need for round-the-clock service.
Conclusions and results of marketing research
Unfortunately, relatively cheap and less time-consuming experiments in the laboratory have become ubiquitous for almost any kind of research. Undoubtedly, if we review the current types of experiments and their role in marketing, then it is laboratory tests that should be awardeda particularly significant place in the current realities.
Almost always, the director of the company has full control over the budget spent and can choose acceptable and sufficient amounts of research. This is the key difference between laboratory and field studies, in which the budget is often spent spontaneously, it is not possible to predict the exact waiting time for any result.
The combination of these circumstances led to the fact that the vicious practice of conducting experiments in the laboratories of independent agencies was born. The main task of such agencies was not at all to find objective answers to the questions posed in the study, but to correctly distribute the customer's advertising budget and provide reports on the funds spent.
In combination with the second problem of modern Russian and world marketing - the lack of qualified personnel - a significant part of modern research bears rather contradictory conclusions and results that do not pretend to be objective and useless from the point of view of practical application.
