Hurdles in Market Research

Companies gain competitive advantage by getting up-to-date and accurate information about the market and competitors through market research. But sometimes there comes some hurdles which restrict the company to access that information. Some of the hurdles/restrictions are as follows;

Time constraint – in business it is often said that time is money. Companies need to be efficient in every activity in order to survive in the market. They need to make decisions as quickly as possible to sustain their position in the market. In gathering and analyzing the data, time is the major constraint.

Reliability of the data – the quality of market research depend upon how correctly the data is collected. Quality can be damaged by less meaningful questions in questionnaire, biased interviews, unrepresentative sample etc. In order to make the research more reliable there should be more effort required to collect correct data, sample must be representative etc.

Budgetary constraint – collecting and analyzing data can be very expensive. Some organizations have lack of expertise in order to get extensive research while they have lack of funds to pay to expert research agencies to collect data for them. In this case company need to rely on less than perfect data which is collected through secondary source (less costly).

Legal and ethical constraints – different laws like Data Protection Act (1998) which has a number of allegations for market researchers collecting and holding different kind of data. For example the researchers have to ensure that the data they obtain must be kept secure and only use for lawful purpose, also kept it as long as it is necessary. Organization need to behave ethically when dealing with public. It must be cleared that why data is collected and for what purpose the data will used in future.