What is Market Research?

Designers in the fashion industry face the huge pressure of making sales and gaining profit in order to keep their company going. To do this they must understand their target market so they can meet the needs of their consumers.


How do designers meet the needs of their market:
- Through market analysis: the process of analysing changing consumer trends, current and potential competitors, company strengths and resources, and the technological, legal and economic environments. Designers can use this to gain consumer insight, which provides an understanding of their expressed and unspoken needs and realities that affect how they make life, brand and product choices.
- With market segmentation: the process of identifying groups of people who behave in similar ways to each other, but somewhat differently than other groups, with the goal of minimising differences within segments and maximising differences between segments. This increases customer satisfaction and profitability.
- With knowledge of the consumer decision process (CDP): the CDP represents a map of consumers' minds that designers can use to help guide product mix, communications and sales strategies. Designers need to have an understanding of how consumers search for information in order to make pre-purchase evaluations about products that meet their needs, and also about consumers purchase and consumption habits to maintain customer loyalty.
- Understand what types of consumers are in their market segments: either heavy, moderate or light users of products and whether they have needs for conspicuous consumption (purchases motivated by the desire to show others how successful they are) or not.


Global brands - how they approach marketing:
- Designers for global brands must understand markets on a global basis in terms of people = cultural, ethnic and motivation variables affect consumer decisions
- Thinking globally involves the ability to understand markets beyond their own country of origin
- Intermarket segmentation: the identification of groups of customers who transcend traditional market or geographic boundaries (similar segments around the world). This plays a key role in understanding the similarities and differences between consumers and countries that become the foundation of market standardisation. 


What is market research?
- An organised effort to gather information about markets and/or customers.
- It is a key factor to get advantage over competitors and provides important information to identify and analyse the market need, size and competition.
- Includes social and opinion research to gain insight. 


(Information from Consumer Behaviour paper 156.232 and 'Consumer Behaviour: An Asia Pacific Approach' textbook)