Market Research and Organizational Design

Abstract

Globalization is the strongest impetus for companies intending to expand their business from global marketplace to bottom-of-the-pyramid, or vice versa for local companies going global. Staying global and abreast of market developments requires companies to engage in continuous market research to analyze demand, supply, consumer behavior, pricing, competition, and innovation and technology dynamics. As companies invest in building global strategies to gain competitive advantage, the need to understand consumers in new destinations continuously increases. Marketing research is the one and only conventional mechanism through which companies understand their current as well as potential customers. Companies are in a race to enhance their outreach and contemplate competitively advantageous destinations by facing the challenge of utilizing varying market research results for domestic and international markets. Hence, companies must strengthen and equip their organizational platform to develop strategies arising from changing market research outcomes. In an effort to become customer-centric, companies should develop market research design and implementation following appropriate research studies. Several factors represent the underlying market challenges, and efficient companies address them in order to conduct market research across destinations (Young and Javalgi, 2007).