Marketing For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 4

Researching Your Customers, Competitors, and Industry

In This Chapter

Identifying creative new ideas for business success

Asking smart questions

Employing effective, inexpensive research techniques

Riding the tide of a growth trend

Big businesses hire research firms to do extensive customer surveys and to run discussion groups with customers. The marketers then sit down to 50-page reports filled with tables and charts before making any decisions. I rarely recommend this traditional approach, because people usually have far less time and money, let alone patience, than this approach demands.

Instead, in this chapter, I help you better understand your customers and competitors and, in the process, better understand yourself. I show you how to adopt an inquisitive approach by sharing simple, efficient ways of learning about customers and competitors. As a marketer, you need to ask questions and seek useful answers — something you can do on any budget. Often a resourceful marketer can learn something useful for free on the web and may even manage to avoid an expensive custom ...