Market research is basically any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers. It is used to determine and implement a business strategy. Market research and marketing research are interchangeable words, but the main difference between the two is that while marketing research deals with specifically the marketing process, market research on the other hand is specifically concerned about the markets.  With market research, researchers discover what people want, need or believe in. another aspect is that it can also discover how people act in a particular way.  After completion of market research, one can determine the methods of marketing the products or services.  Several instruments are used for market research focus group discussion and survey is some of the common tools used extensively by marketers to meet their objectives.

Prior to starting a business venture, one needs to have information about the markets in terms of prices of commodities, supply and demand of the end products. All this can be obtained with market research. Such information gives an edge to the marketers in launching a product which meets the requirements of the end customers to a large extent.  Without proper market research, marketers would be hitting in dark and their efforts would simple go waste.  With market research, one can predict the upwards or downwards trends / movements of the market during a particular period of time.  This gives a fairly good idea to marketers to know about the acceptability of their products and services