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Congratulations for getting in your summer placements!!! A summer internship is not only a very good corporate exposure in the middle of your MBA; it also helps you to apply your classroom theory in actual live projects. A successful summer internship can land you a
pre-placement offer (PPO) and affect the impression people will have of your campus in corporate world. It can also lead to good number of insights and help your project guide in the company to make important decisions regarding strategy. This is especially true in market research projects.

Market Research - Introduction

Market Research is the science of designing, collecting, aggregating, analyzing and reporting customer data as specific to particular marketing situations or stimuli. Market research is primarily classified into primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary Research involves direct interaction with the customer. The data collected can be in the form of questionnaires with specific questions designed to tap the customer's preferences and perceptions of the product. Questionnaires can be paper-based or web-based. The website www.surveymonkey.com is a leading questionnaire provider for internet-based surveys. Generally, primary research is preferred for fast-moving marketing situations like product launches or product promotions.

Secondary Research

Secondary Research uses existing sources of data, for establishing inferences. The data here could be existing published surveys, journals, data collections, or industry databases. We would primarily deal with doing primary market research projects in this article.

Design of questionnaire involves a set of principles for maximizing customer responses and data insights in minimum time and in an unbiased manner. Data collection involves use of cross tabulations of responses to questions or coding responses to questions into numerical format to aggregate this. For example, if any question has five responses like (very good, good, average, bad, very bad), these responses would be coded into the data sheet as 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. This coding then uses specialized softwares like SPSS and Quantum for tabulating response, building cluster analysis of customers and factor analysis of responses. Finally, market research reports would be in the form of a PDF or a PowerPoint Presentation that will go through the approach of collecting data, analytical techniques used, statistical inferences and final recommendations.

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* Ajay Ohri is an alumnus of IIM Lucknow, and has worked with some of the largest BPOs in India (including two BPOs listed on NYSE).
Currently, he is running his own database consulting firm, and is the founder of his website business
http://decisionstats.com.
The views expressed in the article are his personal views.