Marketing Research and New Product Development in Selected Organizations in Enugu State

In today’s world, the importance of effective marketing research in new product development (NPD) is now widely accepted wing to rapid advancement in technology, constant changes in consumers’ choices and preferences, and dynamic trends in tastes and fashions. Marketing research has been seen as the very nexus that links customers and firms through information. It provides information that is used to identify product strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is also used to generate, refine, evaluate, and interpret marketing actions, track marketing performance; and understand marketing as a discipline and process. The concept of marketing research is a very important phenomenon in new product development process. It represents the very first step that determines the success of any product. It also acts as the foundation and cornerstone of any product. To obtain the desired and appropriate results from marketing research, an organization must be guided by certain plans to satisfy all or at least most of the company objectives for it to be worthwhile. Therefore, marketing research if well-defined and formulated has an impact on new product development of an organization. The extent to which the firms put marketing research into practice in solving their marketing problems is what this study intends to examine. Marketing research is now widely accepted as one of the most important assets possessed by organization. Zikmund (1998) opines that the activities of marketing research include defining the market opportunity and problems, generating, and evaluating market ideas, monitoring performance, and understanding the marketing process. The American Marketing Research Association (2017) opines that marketing research specifies the information required to address issues in marketing, design the method for collecting information, manage and implement the data collection process, analyze the results, and communicate the findings and their implications. Marketing Research serves as a tool that is used to arrive at strategic and tactical decisions needed by organizations to develop new products that meet the needs of consumers and achieve the objectives of the organization. Conducting research before developing a new product is a strategic step in determining the best way to discover opportunities and gain loyalty in the market. Prahalad and Hamel (1990) stated that research can lead to a core competence that either differentiates a firm from its competitors or provides a threshold competency that is necessary just to survive in fast-changing and innovative industry sectors. Hollingsworth (1996) and Jeffery (1998) noted that new product development strategies and processes should change following changes in market trends and technology. Marketing research is important for proactive management because it helps to develop marketing options through market segmentation, consumer attitude, product usage studies, and market opportunity analysis (McDaniel & Gates, 2006). Given the importance and value of new product development on a firm’s performance, researchers have developed descriptive frameworks based on linear, recursive, and chaotic system perspectives, which provide different insights and descriptive theories about the new product development process, structure, and behaviour. These are then often the basis for normative research, which seeks to predict and prescribe causality in new product development processes (Griffin, 1997). Marketing research is the first critical step in developing a new product in the sense that it helps firms understand that products are designed to provide solutions to customers’ problems, and a good product is the one that provides that solution in a better way than products offered by competitors. Finally, the role of research in new product development is to help firms identify competitors, understand consumers’ problems more than competitors do, and then develop better products than the ones offered by competitors. Research is therefore an integral part of every successful new product development process in organizations. This study intends to examine the extent to which organizations deploy marketing research as a tool for solving problems associated with new product development.