Marketing Research for Optometrists
Marketing research is an integral part of marketing. To demonstrate effective marketing for an optometry practice, its products, and services, managers are on a mission to understand the marketing concept and be able to put a marketing strategy. To accomplish this mission, they need the information to carry out the marketing concept and come up with the right strategy. Even the most successful companies have at a certain point in time failed to bring to the market the right product due to lack of marketing research; and that costed their fortunes. Marketing research enables designing, gathering, analyzing, and reporting information that will be used to solve a specific marketing problem.

Marketing managers are required to make countless decisions while applying the marketing concept and developing a marketing strategy. The marketing concept is based on the belief that a marketer can help build a successful business by fulfilling the customers’ needs and wants. Therefore, marketers know that they need information about the target market to determine the needs and wants of customers to build the right marketing strategy. Moreover, marketers need to constantly monitor and collect updated information about competition and markets to be aware of environmental changes. When companies conduct wrong marketing research it leads to wrong decisions.

We employ marketing research in a practice when we want to:

1- Identify market opportunities and problems; that could be accomplished by environmental analysis studies, SWOT analysis, market segment identification, or market demand determination.

2- Generate, refine, and evaluate potential marketing actions; that could be accomplished by marketing-mix evaluation testing, new-product prototype testing, pricing tests, advertising pretesting, etc

3- Monitor marketing performance; that could be accomplished by studying practices that already have a marketing mix to evaluate how well this nix is performing. Examples include image analysis, customer satisfaction studies, employee satisfaction studies, website evaluation studies, etc.

4- Improve marketing as a process rather than solving a specific problem; that could be accomplished by studying ROI improvement studies, new product innovation studies, new media studies, new marketing processes studies, etc.