| dc.description.abstract | Marketing research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or
customers. It is a systematic gathering and interpretation of information about markets
using analytical and statistical methods and techniques to gain market insight and support
decision making. The process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about
a market, about a product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the
past, present and potential customers for the product or service; research into the
characteristics, spending habits, location and needs of your business's target market, the
industry as a whole, and the particular competitors you face. Research which explores the
advantages of marketing research will help to raise awareness among those who are
unacquainted with its potential and benefits within their business start up planning. The
objective of the study was to determine the extent to which Micro, Small and Medium
sized enterprises in Nairobi County have adopted marketing research. In this study I used
descriptive statistics to interpret the data. The target population for this study was all
businesses in the Nairobi County, Central Business District. Primary data will be
collected by use of questionnaires which was dropped and picked later after they are
filled. Questionnaires was scripted and coded and keyed in at SPSS. The data was
analyzed using SPSS. The study was to investigate the extent of adoption of marketing
research to MSME’s. I sampled Micro, Small and Medium sized businesses within the
Nairobi Central Business District and sampled 384 enterprises. I used multistage
stratified sampling was used where businesses were divided into three strata’s namely
Micro, Small and Medium enterprises. Data was collected using drop and pick later way
of administering the questionnaires. The study found out that most MSME conduct little
or no marketing research practices. This is due to the fact that marketing research is seen
as secondary activity and as a luxury, little do the business owners know that marketing
research is the backbone of business success and long term going concern. MSME
businesses tends to ignore research and they would argue that it is expensive, it is for
large corporate only, secondary data suffices, information can be gathered from the
internet and conclusions and decision making made, friends and family insight would be
enough for our strategies. A business owner may also have high motivation of conducting
marketing research for it to fade along the way and he ends up conducting none or little
of it. It was therefore advisable for MSME to always conduct marketing research to
ensure they are informed on the marketing and be competitive in their activities. Some of
the practices that they can adopt that are less involving and less costly would include use
of free data collection and automated analytics like Google Docs Form, use of open
source analysis software like R statistical software, use of Omnibus offered by Marketing
Research Companies, use of open source computer aided personal interviews (CAPI) data
collection tools like Open Data Kit, (ODK). Then marketing research company need to
also accommodate this category of MSME in their strategy as potential sector since if
they aid them to grow they will be the future beneficiaries as MSME are the potential
large enterprises in future. | en |
