During a meeting with my PhD supervisors yesterday afternoon, we got onto a very brief chat about the use of the term ‘Market Research’ VS ‘Marketing Research’. I know I have had my wrist lightly slapped a few times using Market Research but by and large, it seems to me that everybody uses this term. Indeed, I find it rare for anyone to refer to our industry as ‘Marketing Research’. However, one of my supervisors, Dr Anca Yallop at the University of Winchester said she had carried out some work on this, and shared with me a paragraph of it:
“Although the two terms (‘marketing research’ vs. ‘market research’) seem to be used interchangeably in the literature, they are in fact different. Market research deals specifically with gathering of information about a market’s size and trends; hence, it is much narrow and customer oriented only. Marketing research covers a wider range of activities – it may involve market research. However, marketing research is a more general systematic process that can be applied to a variety of marketing problems (McDonald, 2007; McQuarrie, 2006). These can include marketing activities and processes related to the four P’s (product, price, place and promotion) such as, for instance, research into new products, new pricing strategies, and new ways of promoting a product/service or new methods of distribution such as via the Internet. For these reasons, the term marketing research is considered a more accurate one that covers a wider range of research activities, including those that are market and customer oriented.”
So there you have it! The two terms don’t even mean the same thing! In the future, I will now use Marketing Research as a term to describe the wider range of activities!