Market Research

Every company has to understand the behaviour of the consumers, what the market is
expecting, who are their customers, trends in the market and other factors like this. Company
having a better knowledge of the same will have a competitive advantage and will be able to
satisfy their customers better. So, understanding the market is crucial for the company. To
understand the market the company has to collect all the relevant data and process the same.
That’s where, “Market Research” concept comes into picture.
The automobile Industry, one of the major industries have a huge and heterogeneous market.
Lot of factors like, income level of consumers, family size, age, and other demographic
factors. As mentioned under the Market Segmentation, market can be segmented based on
demographic, geographic, behavioural, psychographic, technographic and others. It is
important for the companies in the automobile industry to understand the geographic location
they are operating and targeting and plan accordingly.

Research Methods
There are lot of methods to do the research like, Surveys, Focus groups, behavioural research,
Observational research. Companies in the automobile industry can adopt any research
methods based on their objective and data availability.
1. Survey: In this method, the company can understand the preferences, knowledge of
customers’ directly by asking them. In the automobile Industry it can used to when
launching a new feature or product into the market. By having a substantial amount of
population as sample size, companies can assess what consumers are thinking and
deliver accordingly.
2. Focus Groups: In focus groups, companies can talk to set of people selected by the
company on certain factors and discuss about their products/services or also about
their needs. Tesla made use of focus groups to design the Model X; they conducted
focus groups with women and understand their choices and preferences. By doing that
they understood their customers and designed accordingly.
3. Behavioural research: As the name suggests, in this type of research the companies
understand the purchasing and other consumer behaviours and act accordingly.
Automobile companies can understand the buying sentiments of consumers against
each segment.
4. Observational research: In this type of research, the company will observe the
consumers for instance they can understand what triggers them to act in a certain
manner. An automobile company can do a ethnographic study of a particular region
and find the culture of the people to produce and market based on their wants. For
instance, in India, middle income group is the major and people prefer a family car,
understanding the culture of a region is very important, giants of automobile have
failed when they didn’t read the market very well.