What Is Marketing Research? Fields, Methods and Ethics

Marketing research is the systematic study of consumers, markets, and the firms and institutions that serve them. The phrase covers two overlapping things: an academic field housed mostly in business schools, which builds and tests theory about consumer behavior and market outcomes, and a professional practice that gathers information to support decisions about products, prices, communication, and distribution. People searching for “marketing research,” “market research,” or “consumer research” usually mean one or the other, so this guide separates them, explains the methods both rely on, names the main scholarly societies and journals, and covers the ethics and human-subjects questions that arise when the participants are customers.

This page describes a research field and its methods. It is not business, legal, or investment advice, and it does not describe how any particular company should market a product.

What Is Marketing Research?

The American Marketing Association (AMA) publishes official definitions of both terms. It defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” It defines marketing research as “the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information—information used to identify and define opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate actions; monitor performance; and improve understanding of it as a process.” (Both quoted from the AMA’s published definitions page; the AMA revises its definitions periodically, so check its site for the current wording.)

Three points follow from that definition.

• It is information work in service of understanding exchange. The object of study is the relationship between people and the offerings they choose, avoid, recommend, or ignore.
• It spans description, explanation, and decision support. A descriptive study might measure awareness of a product category. An explanatory one tests why a framing changes choices. A decision-support study estimates what would happen if a price or feature changed.
• The participants are usually ordinary people, not patients or specimens. That shapes both methods (large online samples, behavioral data from platforms) and ethics (consent, deception, privacy, and data from commercial settings).

Marketing Research vs. Market Research vs. Consumer Research

The three phrases are used loosely and often interchangeably, but there are useful tendencies:

• Market research is the common industry term for gathering information about a market: its size, segments, competitors, and customer needs. It is heavily practical and often commissioned by a firm.
• Marketing research is the broader label used by the AMA and in textbooks, and it includes market research plus research on pricing, advertising effectiveness, brand, channels, and customer satisfaction.
• Consumer research and consumer behavior name the academic subfield that studies how individuals and households perceive, choose, use, and dispose of goods and services. It draws strongly on psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, and anthropology.

Marketing as an Academic Field

In universities, marketing is one functional area within the business school, alongside management, accounting, finance, operations, and information systems (see What Is Management Research? for the wider picture). Marketing faculty typically hold a doctorate in marketing or a closely related area, and the field is often described as having two broad wings that overlap but publish in somewhat different venues.

• The behavioral wing (consumer behavior, consumer psychology) mostly runs experiments and surveys to understand judgment and choice: how framing, social influence, emotion, identity, and context affect what people want and do.
• The quantitative wing (sometimes called marketing science or quantitative marketing) builds statistical and economic models of demand, pricing, competition, advertising response, and customer relationships, and estimates them on purchase, survey, and platform data.

Common Subfields and Topics

• Consumer behavior: perception, attention, memory, motivation, attitudes, decision-making, self-control, and cultural influences on consumption.
• Pricing and demand estimation: how price perceptions form and how sales respond to price, promotion, and assortment.
• Branding and communication: how brands acquire meaning and how advertising, social media, and word of mouth change beliefs and behavior.
• Customer relationships and analytics: segmentation, loyalty, lifetime value, churn, and personalization.
• Channels, retail, and digital markets: how platforms, search, ratings, and recommendation systems shape what people find and buy.
• Innovation and new products: how consumers evaluate and adopt new offerings. This subfield touches entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.
• Marketing and society: consumer welfare, public policy, vulnerable consumers, sustainability, and the ethics of persuasion. The boundary with public policy is porous.

Research Methods

Marketing research is multi-method. The same question, such as “how much do customers value this feature?”, can be approached with several of the methods below, and strong studies often combine them. For the wider methodological toolkit see CASRAI’s research methods hub.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys measure attitudes, intentions, awareness, satisfaction, and self-reported behavior. Good survey design depends on question wording, response scales, sampling, and checking for inattentive responses. Common weaknesses are self-report error, social desirability, low response rates, and common-method bias when predictor and outcome come from the same questionnaire. CASRAI’s dictionary entry on survey research methods is the starting point, and detecting careless responding in survey data covers a problem that is especially acute in paid online panels. For tooling, see the comparison of academic survey platforms.

Conjoint Analysis and Discrete Choice Experiments

Marketing is one of the fields where stated-preference methods were developed and refined. In a conjoint study, respondents rate or rank product profiles that vary in attributes such as price, brand, and features, and the analysis recovers how much each attribute level contributes to preference (“part-worth utilities”) and how important each attribute is overall. A discrete choice experiment instead asks respondents to choose among alternatives in repeated choice tasks, which mirrors real purchase decisions and supports models of choice probabilities and willingness to pay. The design questions, such as which attributes and levels to include and how to build the choice sets, determine whether the results are interpretable. See CASRAI’s guides to conjoint analysis and discrete choice experiments.

Randomized Experiments

Experiments are the main tool of the behavioral wing because random assignment supports causal claims. A typical study randomly assigns participants to see different ads, prices, package labels, or product descriptions and compares what they say or do. Multi-factor designs let researchers test several manipulations and their interactions at once; see factorial designs and the dictionary entry on experimental design. Lab and online experiments are cheap and fast but face questions about participant quality, attention, and whether results generalize beyond a short task. For the distinction between randomized and non-randomized designs, see experimental vs. quasi-experimental design.

Field Experiments and A/B Testing

An A/B test is a randomized experiment run on live users: version A and version B of a web page, email, price display, or app feature are shown to randomly assigned visitors, and an outcome such as clicks or purchases is compared. Academic marketing researchers use the same logic in field experiments with partner firms, which gain realism at the cost of access negotiations, limited control, and often noisier outcomes. Sound practice includes deciding the outcome measure and sample size in advance, avoiding repeated peeking at results, and checking that assignment was truly random. Whether such a test counts as research needing ethical review depends on its purpose and structure, discussed below.

Observational and Behavioral Data

Scanner, loyalty-card, clickstream, and platform data record what people actually did rather than what they said. The main challenge is causal identification, because customers who see an ad or receive an offer may differ systematically from those who do not. Researchers use quasi-experimental designs and structural demand models to address this. Privacy and data-governance questions are significant when data are linked at the individual level.

Qualitative and Ethnographic Research

Interviews, focus groups, diary studies, and ethnographic observation explore meanings, motivations, and practices that a questionnaire would not anticipate. They are used to generate hypotheses, build theory, and design later surveys or experiments, and are central to interpretive consumer research.

Text Analytics and Computational Methods

Reviews, social media posts, call-center transcripts, and open-ended survey answers are large bodies of consumer language. Text analytics applies techniques such as dictionary-based sentiment scoring, topic modeling, and supervised machine learning to measure what consumers talk about and how they feel. Validity is the central issue: automatic measures should be checked against human coding, and a model trained on one platform or period may not transfer. Related methods in the field include machine-learning prediction of customer behavior and image analysis. See CASRAI’s overview of data science for the underlying toolkit.

Neuroscience and Physiological Measures

Some consumer research uses eye tracking, skin conductance, or brain imaging to study attention and emotion. These measures add data that people cannot self-report, but they are expensive, involve small samples, and are easy to over-interpret, so they usually supplement rather than replace behavioral measures.

Societies, Associations, and Journals

American Marketing Association

The AMA is a large professional association for marketers that also supports academic research, and it is the source of the standard definitions quoted above. Its site describes the Journal of Marketing as an unrivaled scholarly journal. The AMA’s academic journals are widely understood to include the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research; check the AMA site for the full current list.

Association for Consumer Research

The Association for Consumer Research (ACR) describes itself as a collection of academics, practitioners, and government leaders devoted to the study of consumer behavior, bringing together researchers from various disciplines worldwide. Its affiliated Journal of the Association for Consumer Research publishes quarterly thematic issues on topics in consumer behavior and is published by the University of Chicago Press. The Journal of Consumer Research is another leading venue for the behavioral wing.

INFORMS Society for Marketing Science

The quantitative wing is closely associated with the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and the journal Marketing Science, which publish and discuss modeling, choice, pricing, and analytics research. Because INFORMS is also the home of operations research (see What Is Operations Research?), the overlap between marketing analytics and management science is substantial.

Other Venues

Marketing research also appears in management and psychology outlets, in practitioner-oriented journals, and in specialty journals on retailing, advertising, public policy, and international marketing. Business schools often keep internal journal lists for tenure and promotion, and those lists differ by school and country, so confirm the local list rather than assuming one.

Professional Practice and Standards

Outside universities, commercial market research firms, in-house insights teams, and consultancies conduct most marketing research. Professional bodies for the research industry publish codes of conduct on honesty, confidentiality of respondents, and the separation of research from selling. Researchers conducting studies for a company should know which code applies to them and keep research distinct from sales or promotion disguised as a survey.

Funding

Much marketing research is inexpensive relative to laboratory science, since the main costs are faculty time, participant payments, and data access. Sources include school research funds and summer stipends, industry partners who provide data or field sites (usually under data-use or research agreements), private foundations, and federal agencies for work tied to their missions, such as consumer health decisions, financial decision-making, or public policy. Program names and priorities change, so confirm current opportunities with each funder. For the funding lifecycle from the administrative side, see CASRAI’s grants management hub.

Training and Careers

The research path is a marketing PhD, typically combining coursework in a behavioral discipline or in economics and statistics with methods training and a dissertation. Graduates mostly become business-school faculty; others work in industry research, technology company data science and experimentation roles, consulting, or government. Professional master’s programs in marketing analytics and market research prepare practitioners but are not research degrees. A broad methods foundation is the common denominator: see What Is Statistics? and What Is Economics?.

Ethics of Consumer Research and IRB Considerations

Because consumer research involves people, it raises the same core questions as other human-subjects research: informed consent, risk, privacy, and fair treatment. In the United States, universities generally route studies through an Institutional Review Board (IRB); see What Is an Institutional Review Board?. Several issues come up repeatedly in marketing studies.

• Exempt and expedited review. Many surveys, interviews, and minimal-risk online experiments qualify for exempt or expedited review, but the institution, not the investigator, makes that determination. See the exempt categories explained and exempt vs. expedited review.
• Deception and debriefing. Behavioral experiments sometimes withhold the true purpose of a study, for example because telling participants what is being tested would change their behavior. Reviewers generally expect a justification that no non-deceptive design would work, minimal risk, and a debriefing afterward. Practices on deception differ across fields and journals.
• Online panels and crowdsourced participants. Online recruitment raises questions about fair payment, age and eligibility screening, consent displays that people actually read, and protection of identifiers. IP addresses and platform worker IDs can be identifiers, so data handling plans should cover them.
• A/B tests and platform experiments. Companies run routine product experiments as business operations, and whether a given one is “research” subject to review depends on whether it is designed to produce generalizable knowledge, who is involved, and institutional policy. When university researchers analyze or design a company’s experiment for publication, the institution will usually want an IRB determination first. Studies that manipulate emotion, expose people to persuasion intended to change a health or financial behavior, or involve vulnerable groups deserve extra care.
• Children and vulnerable consumers. Research with minors or people in financially or medically vulnerable situations has additional protections and typically requires fuller review and parental permission procedures.
• Privacy and secondary data. Linking purchase, location, or browsing records to individuals creates re-identification risk. Data use terms, de-identification, and storage should be settled before access begins.
• Research integrity. Preregistration, transparent reporting of all conditions and exclusions, and sharing data and code address concerns about the replicability of behavioral findings. Research for a sponsor should disclose the funding and any publication restrictions.

Non-US researchers should follow the ethics review rules of their own country and institution, and international data collection can trigger additional data-protection requirements.

Where Marketing Research Meets Research Administration

• Human-subjects review for surveys and online experiments, as above.
• Agreements with companies: data-use agreements, confidentiality terms, publication review rights, and ownership of results, negotiated by sponsored programs offices before access begins.
• Participant payments: compensation to many online participants raises payment-processing and recordkeeping questions for the institution’s finance office.
• Conflicts of interest: faculty who consult for or hold equity in firms they study need disclosure and management plans.
• Data management: retention, security, and sharing plans for survey and behavioral datasets.

See CASRAI’s research administration hub for the broader administrative context.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is marketing research in simple terms?

It is the structured collection and analysis of information about customers, markets, and marketing actions, used either to build general knowledge (academic research) or to support a specific decision (applied research).

What is the difference between marketing research and market research?

Market research usually refers to studying a market: its size, segments, competitors, and customer needs. Marketing research is broader and also covers pricing, advertising, branding, and channel effectiveness. In practice the terms are often used interchangeably.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research, or consumer behavior research, is the academic study of how individuals and households choose, use, and evaluate goods and services. It is a subfield of marketing that borrows heavily from psychology and economics.

What are the main methods in marketing research?

Surveys, conjoint analysis and discrete choice experiments, randomized lab and field experiments (including A/B tests), analysis of purchase and behavioral data, qualitative interviews and ethnography, and text analytics on reviews and social media.

What is the difference between conjoint analysis and a discrete choice experiment?

Both estimate how people value product attributes. Conjoint tasks traditionally ask respondents to rate or rank profiles, while discrete choice experiments ask them to pick among alternatives, which resembles real choices and supports choice-probability models.

Is an A/B test a research experiment?

Structurally yes: it randomly assigns people to conditions and compares outcomes. Whether it needs ethics review depends on its purpose, the institution, and whether it is intended to produce generalizable knowledge. When in doubt, ask your IRB for a determination.

Does online marketing research need IRB approval?

If it is human-subjects research conducted by a university researcher, the IRB decides whether it is exempt, expedited, or fully reviewed. Many minimal-risk online surveys and experiments are exempt, but the determination is made by the institution.

Is marketing research a science?

Academic marketing research is a social science: it states hypotheses, tests them against evidence, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals. Applied market research varies widely in rigor.

What degree do you need to do marketing research?

Academic research careers generally require a doctorate in marketing or a related area. Industry roles often hire people with master’s degrees in marketing analytics, statistics, psychology, or economics.

Related CASRAI Resources

This guide belongs to CASRAI’s discipline explainers. Closely related pages include management research, behavioral economics, psychology, statistics, conjoint analysis, and discrete choice experiments. For ethics and administration, start with institutional review boards and the research methods hub.