Much of the information needed for marketing is specific to your products, markets and customers. This means that research is invariably required to market effectively - to determine the size of market segments, to understand the dynamics of the market place and to make sure that customers understand why they should be buying your products and services.

There are probably 4 fundamental elements:

• are we targeting those market segments that have the best profit potential?
• do we really understand what makes customers tick? How do they make their purchase decisions?
• do we communicate to them the information they need to make those decisions through the channels where they expect to be able to find the information?
• do our products and services really fulfil their needs?

The pages of this section, discuss some of the research possibilities. If we want to change anything - the product, the price, the distribution channels - we need to do so while understanding the effect this may have on sales and profit, always beneficially of course!