Often you can hear the opinion that marketing is only a theory and does not work in the real world. Millions of entrepreneurs complain about marketing inefficiencies every day. They also complain about full-time marketers and marketing consultants, who once again made a set of beautifully sounding phrases and suggestions for presentations. However, in life, the goods and services of companies after this did not advance one iota.
Why marketing experiments are needed
The reason described at the beginning of the situation is extremely simple. All decisions made to change and modernize market policy should be elementary tested in practice, and not the subsequent test of time. Marketing without a result is a waste of money and time, the main building blocks of any business. Marketing should ensure stable and ever-increasing sales, and for this reason, marketers conduct their experiments.
An experiment in marketing is a method of collecting primary data through the active participation of researchers in a number of consumer processes. The experiment in this case establishes the relationship between certain events, looking for causal relationships. Another objective of such an experiment is the study of 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.
Positive aspects of conducting experiments
As one of the most objective types of research, marketing experiments help you find working solutions for the real market. It is noteworthy that it is precisely experiments and the resulting empirical data that are given priority in many scientific and technical disciplines, including medicine, physics, chemistry and technology.
The advantages of an experiment in marketing are as follows:
- Risk reduction for management personnel. In the course of the experiment, marketing theories are checked and optimal solutions to problems are selected.
- The highest objectivity in marketing of all available types of research is with this method.
- Identification of causal relationships and the nature of these relationships for two independent or ambiguously dependent at first glance events.
Disadvantages of marketing experiments
Often the determining disadvantage of such studies is their high cost and time spent on conducting. A lack of understanding of the market can result in large losses and costs.
In marketing, an experiment is always a study of key factors and the relationships between variables, revealing the complex nature of the interaction of these variables with each other. The erroneous handling of secondary factors instead of the key ones, the search for connections between insignificant variables is a costly mistake both financially and temporally.
The problems described above sometimes lead to disappointing conclusions that the results of the study can be applied to only one of the conditions in which it was conducted. Using this model in practice under other changing conditions becomes impossible, and such a study is recognized as biased.
Another common problem of an experiment in marketing research is the banal obsolescence of the data. This happens with a long period of time between the experiment and practical application in business.
Market Research Terms
Modern experts usually distinguish two types of experiments in marketing, depending on the conditions of the conduct. The first type is laboratory research, and the second is field research. In addition, field experiments are often referred to as test marketing. It is the last subtype of research in marketing that is the most costly and complex.
Many companies prefer to confine themselves to laboratory experiments with the possibility of direct permanent control over the process and all factors during the process. Complex research, in which both laboratory and field experiments are carried out in order to obtain the most objective assessment, can be considered the highest quality.
Laboratory Marketing Experiments
Laboratory experiments in marketing are research conducted in artificially created conditions. The creation of such conditions eliminates one of the main problems - interfering extraneous factors or secondary variables that can disrupt the desired causal relationship.
High efficiency of such experiments is noted in some cases. For example, this type of research is often used when evaluating the opinions of customers about specific types of advertising or tracking reactions to advertising influences. Used by companies in the selection of the most effective advertising methods for a specific target audience (by age, gender or social layer).
Field Marketing Experiments
Field experiments in marketing are real-world research. They are deservedly considered more objective for the real world than "sterile" laboratory tests. Often carried out directly in stores, on the street or at home with potential consumers. The latter may mean watching advertisements on TV or listening to the radio.
Typically, such studies cover the scale of one or more cities. Marketers also call these experiments market tests, because the experimental activity is aimed at really working and functioning markets.
Market testing, in turn, is divided into standard, electronic, simulation and controlled.
Tasks that are decided to be solved by conducting an experiment
A wide range of problems can be resolved through marketing research and observation. The experiment is used 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 assortment in the market, develop promotions and discounts for customers.
- To analyze and compare the activities of competing products and companies.
- When choosing the optimal work schedule for points of sale, including finding the best time for the beginning and end of the working day, as well as confirmation (or refutation) of the need for round-the-clock service.
Findings and Results from Marketing Research
Unfortunately, relatively cheap and less time-consuming experiments in laboratory conditions have become widely used for almost any research. Undoubtedly, if we conduct a review of the actual types of experiments and their role in marketing, then laboratory tests should be given a 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 volumes of research. This is the key difference between laboratory studies and field studies, in which the budget is often spent spontaneously; it is not possible to predict the exact time to wait for any result.
The confluence of these circumstances led to the birth of the vicious practice of conducting experiments in the laboratories of independent agencies. The main task of such agencies was not 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 Russian and world marketing of our time - the lack of qualified personnel - a significant part of modern research carries quite contradictory conclusions and results that do not claim objectivity and are useless from the point of view of practical application.