How has the Internet impacted marketing research? As a part of your answer, be sure to address time, cost, approaches, and validity. Why is marketing research important to developing marketing strategy?

First, it has made it easier: access to secondary information has become faster. Instead of going to the library and dig into thousands of stats data one can just enter the statistics bureau web site and find what they need. Also, analysis of competitors has become easier - visit their web site and learn what they offer to customers. So in terms of time and cost, marketing research over the Internet is fast and cheap. This is not only for secondary data, but also for primary data .. it is much easier to send, receive and analyze, self-administered questionnaires by using email. However, there is a draw back - not everything written on-line comes from reliable sources. When evaluating data from on-line source one has to be cautious for the reliability of the source of information. > Marketing research is important for strategy because it gives insight to what consumers want, what are the trends, how is the competition doing, and a bunch of other things that can be used for planning better marketing strategy

Before the internet, conducting a professional qualitative and quantitative analysis would not only cost high amounts, but would also be time consuming and prone to inaccurate, biased results. The facility to conduct market research online has levelled the field for well established large organizations as well as relatively new comers who have the right knowledge and tools. For example, using Wordtracker helps you to identify the number of searches being conducted for a particular product / service (actually drilled down to the keyword), the competition and therefore the KEI. Similarly there are tools that enable to you to access the demand on ebay, research the competition, learn the strategies - and their mistakes - etc. before even deciding what to sell. Likewise, market research can be conducted to see who and how many are bidding on Adwords or Overture for a particular keyword so that you can reduce your spend and get even higher results. Good Luck. -- Joseph Ponnou http://www.internetmarketingtoolsntips.com