Do Small Businesses Need Marketing Research?

Do small businesses need marketing research? According to the new book More Guerrilla Marketing Research they should consider the benefits. Some of the benefits that the book describes are:

Finding out what will get your customers to buy more often

Knowing what will get customers to buy from you more frequently can help you increase revenues by taking actions to encourage repeat purchases from existing customers.

50 % of the profits of most companies come from products that didn’t exist five years ago
Through marketing research you can find out what your customers really want or need and then create a new offering that produces new revenues.

Satisfied customers and loyal customers are usually the most profitable customers
Almost any company cares about having happy customers. Finding out whether your customers are happy and what they are unhappy about can be valuable for increasing customer retention.

One of the best uses of marketing research is to kill a bad idea
Sometimes research can show that an product or service idea that you thought was great, isn’t so great when you test it.  Finding out that a new offering is not well received by customers early on can save a lot of time and money.

While there’s a lot of practical information and it goes into depth into how to conduct market research, it is written in a textbook style that can be tedious. I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you really want to learn about marketing research and how to do it yourself. It even goes into focus groups, which I’m not sure would be necessary for small businesses.