A definition first: A market is a group of customers (people or businesses) who may be interested in buying your product (goods or services.)

People research for the following reasons:
1. Researching a market in order to produce a product to meet a perceived need.
2. Discovering the size of the potential market for a product.
3. Discovering what people want.
4. Deciding how much people would be willing to pay.
5. Understanding what encourages people to buy.
6. Understanding why a product you have is not selling.
7. Discovering who your potential competitors are.
8. Understanding what your competitors are doing in the market.
9. Deciding the best way to launch your product on the market.
10. Finding a niche - or hole in the market - that you can satisfy with one of your products.

Once you have decided on what questions you want answering - there are two main market research methods - the direct and the indirect methods.

" Direct: You go directly to your potential customers and ask them a series of questions. This is expensive and you need a standard set of questions plus some work afterwards in order to review the results. Usually potential customers are contacted via questionnaires or surveys. This can be done face to face, by telephone or via your web site. This kind of research is better for qualitative research such as what reactions to a product are, would you buy if.... etc?
" Indirect: This is research on a topic - or question via the internet or via researching a particular database - such as the National Statistics etc. This kind of research is best for quantitative research - such as how many? Where they are? Etc.

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee’s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust – which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.