Today i review book “Market research in practice” written by Paul Hague, Julia Cupman, Matthew Harrison, Oliver Truman.
As freelancer I am always interested to know what many companies looking on the markets.
It would be nice to have an ability to predict market demands and it’s very enlightened and beneficial for both me and my client.
What covers the “market research in practice” book?
The authors of this book went pretty deep into what is a market research and how the data is collected and what to observe when you collect the data.
Personally I didn’t like the part about questioners and that somebody actually hires people for work on street’s or telephone center calls with goal to ask as many as possible of people one and the same questions.
What I liked a lot and got some advises from this book: where I can get first of all the statistics data, there already exist many companies and USA and EU organizations which collecting statistics and its pretty interesting, but the most interesting statistics on the global market are not free so you were warned.
In this book you will get advice, that collected data must be verified, because there a certain uncertainty when you collect data and you need to question the method by which the data was initially collected and overall integrity of the data.
Authors of this book make strong claims that if the interested researched topic too general it can take time and money to get real representative data.
Personally, when I read this book I asked myself many times, so if the data must be verified, that means you can’t completely trust the presented to you statistics , because its only represents a past state of the market and does not include all possible customers for which your company developing or researching a product , you can only estimate that the demand would be in certain margins and that’s it, there definitely no guarantee that the gathered data is accurate and represents the current state of the market!
Book authors in the last chapters speaking about ethics and this is in my opinion very good, because if the product would be harmful to the enduser and you as market researcher definitely see that , than its definitely not recommended to execute such unethical research.
Summary: This book teach you basic market research analysis, but if you need even deeper study , I think you should read some university grade books about the whole idea of market research analysis, for me it was important, because I do market analysis from time to time and understand what would be the next hyped technology, having said this I do not follow hype, I look at case studies and interview company’s and only then decide to try it out, so by all mean be the first user of the hyped tech , but I personally prefer to be somebody which done deep analysis on technologies with pros and cons and only then take a decision whether to use it or don’t.
Whom I recommend this book?
For marketing people definitely, because it theirs day job to analyze the market demands and look for potential clients.
For a software developer, yeah this too, especially the part how to organize questions in the form , this is definitely useful.
To a product owner and or manager : here I am not so sure, because it depends on your domain, but if you interested how actually data for statistics are collected, then it would definitely increase your knowledge about market research analysis domain.
Does this book answers all questions in reference to the market research analysis, i think not , i definitely missed parts about psychological analysis of the masses , cross-reference techniques for more accurate data, market research methods which allow you to have a estimate for the near future, it seems to me the study of the market research field is big and there a lot of things still to learn….