ABSTRACT
Marketing research is a key factor in maintaining competitiveness over competitors and it provides critical information to identify and analyze the market need, market size, and competition. This chapter argues that the traditional assumption among managers has been that small businesses can use essentially the same managerial principles "as the big boys," only on a suitably reduced scaled. The term guerrilla marketing is often used to describe the most inexpensive, small-scale, and short-term marketing techniques. The chapter discusses basic three avenues: direct mail, phone surveys and personal interviews. Modern competitive intelligence (CI) is often divided four different, but overlapping, types: strategic, competitor, tactical, and technical. CI is also known by several other names: competitor intelligence, business intelligence, strategic intelligence, marketing intelligence, competitive technical intelligence, technology intelligence, and technical intelligence, depending on what specific information is being targeted.
