Understanding Customer Needs and Wants

Business ought to understand their customers' needs and wants, if they want to remain successful in a competitive market place. Therefore, this chapter introduces its readers to market research as tourism businesses continuously require information on their customers. In this light, a well laid-out plan will help them sharpen their research objectives. Once a research problem has been defined, an appropriate methodology could be chosen to gather exploratory or descriptive data. Very often, the tourism businesses may outsource the market research function to specialised agencies. The successful research organisation which has been entrusted with the market research will collect the data, analyse it and interpret its findings. Afterwards, the research agency will be in a position to report its conclusions, research limitations and implications of study. The research report will only add value to the commissioning business if the marketing managers would take heed of its key recommendations