Understanding Customer Needs in Canada – Importance of Marketing Research Excellence in a Market Oriented Organization

Abstract: Company X Equipment division is a mature organization that has experienced a desire to broaden the knowledge about the market potentials of the Canadian markets. There is also an ambition within the organization to improve the sales in Canada by exploring previously unknown market opportunities. The needs for increased knowledge are experienced both at the Canadian sales office and at the Lund headquarters. To be able to make the right strategic and marketing decisions, Company X Equipment division needs in-depth knowledge about the end-users’ current needs together with information regarding trends for the Equipment division’s application areas. The experienced need for increased knowledge implicates an improvement potential within the process of generating marketing information. Company X has furthermore expressed desire to improve within that area. Generating marketing information is a cornerstone in a market-oriented IV organization according to Mohr et al (2010) and by improving the marketing information system (MIS); there is a possibility for Company X to increase its degree of market orientation accordingly. Purpose: The main purpose of this master thesis is to conduct a market research and map the market potential for some of the Canadian application areas within Company X Industrial Equipment division. Furthermore, the thesis also describes and explains the current and future development of the end-user needs within the markets. The secondary purpose of the thesis is to analyze Company X ‘s MIS (marketing information system) and give Company X a recommendation of improvements in order to achieve a higher degree of market orientation and thus reduce the risk of future knowledge gaps. Methodology: The research was conducted through a combination of a descriptive and an explanatory case study in order to achieve an in-depth knowledge of the underlying potential of the Canadian market and the processes of gathering market information within Company X and Company X Canada. The research was mainly qualitative and the information origins from several in-depth interviews together with written second-hand information from literature, articles and e-sources. In order to quantify the market potentials, quantitative second-hand data was used and combined with qualitative and quantitative first-hand empirics from interviewees. The interviews were held at Company X in Sweden and in Canada as well as externally with different stakeholders in Canada. Conclusions: The total potential and the size of a market are determined by how it is defined. Consequently, in some of the application areas studied, the Canadian market potential estimated differs from the one currently assumed by Company X. All the markets currently have low growth rates and a high amount of existing users. Thus, the bulk of the value is in the replacement markets, where Company X is observed to currently be less present and where the knowledge is lower accordingly. There are currently some gaps in Company X’s way of gathering external marketing information about the Canadian markets. Those gaps create a weakness in the MIS that connects the Canadian markets to the decision-making processes within the organization. Improved MIS have potential to improve the current market knowledge and in the long run – increase Company X’s degree of market orientation and thus improve both the strategic and the marketing decision qualities.