Marketing research provides information to reduce uncertainty. It helps focus on decision-making. Sometimes marketing researchers know exactly what their marketing problems are and design careful studies to test specific hypotheses. For example, a soft drink company introducing a new cola might want to know whether a gold o silver label would make packaging effective. In China more attractive packaging is red. Sometimes they use blue color. For example yellow is the color of the Imperator. And white is usually means bad things in Chinese culture. This problem is fully defined and experiment may be designed to answer the marketing question with little preliminary investigation. Coca-Cola – 可口可乐 In translation means good to drink.

Sometimes we could see on advertisement of sport wearing in china Russian Sportsmen like Elena Isinbaeva and Maria Sharapova. 1. They have European appearance and they are successful. Also some products are using Jakie Chan. Of course there are a lot of singers and movie stars which are also face of the Chinese brand products.

In more ambiguous circumstances management may be totally unaware of a marketing problem. The managers may not understand much about Chinese consumer’s feelings about any product. Ordinarily, mine exploratory research is necessary to gain insights into the nature of such problem. To understand the variety of research activity, it is beneficial to categorize types of marketing research..
Marketing research can be classified on the basis of either technique or function. Experiments, surveys, and observational studies are just a few common research techniques. Classifying research by its purpose or function shows how the nature of the marketing problem influences the choice of methods. The nature of problem will determine whether the research is 1. Exploratory 2. Descriptive or 3. Casual.

Exploratory research
Exploratory research is conducted to clarify the nature of ambiguous problems. Management may have discovered a general problem, but it may need research to gain a better understanding of the dimensions of the problem and to aid analysis. Exploratory research is not intended to provide conclusive evidence from which to determine a particular course of action. Usually exploratory research is conducted with the expectation that subsequent research will be required to provide such conclusive evidence. Rushing into detailed surveys before less expensive and more readily available sources of information have been exhausted can lead to serious mistakes.
For example, suppose a Chinese fast-food restaurant is considering expanding and product line with a breakfast menu, exploratory research with a small number of current customers might find a strong negative reaction to eating a spicy vegetable breakfast at a Chinese fast food outlet. Thus, exploratory research might help crystallize a problem and identify information needed for future research.

Descriptive Research
The major purpose of descriptive research, as the name implies, is to describe characteristic of population. Marketing managers frequently need to determine who purchases a product, portray the size of the market, and identify competitors’ actions, and so on. Descriptive research seeks to determine the answer to why, what, when, where, and how questions. Infinity learned from descriptive research that Americans generally start to shop for a car by considering six models. They than narrow the field and usually visit three show rooms before they settle on a model. This takes an average of two weeks. However, buyers of luxury cars typically take a twice as long to complete the decision and make a purchase. These descriptive findings, combined with the knowledge that they faced competition from dozens of luxury models on the market, influenced Infinity to encourage dealers to emphasize the quality of the consumers shopping experience. The company made sizeable investment in dramatic architecture for showrooms and elegant furnishing such as fountains and indoor bridges. Some Infinity showrooms have contemplation zones-designed areas where customers can sit without harassment to consider car purchases in Zenlike silence. In China usually in the Expo of Cars they try to use European appearance models to attract more attention.
Unlike exploratory research, descriptive studies are based on some previous understanding of the nature of the research problem. Although the researcher may have a general understanding of the situation, the conclusive evidence that answers questions of fact necessary to determine a course of action has yet to be collected. Many circumstances require descriptive research to identify the reasons consumers give to explain the nature such as Why do you feel that way?. Although they may describe why consumers feel a certain way, the findings of descriptive study such as this, sometimes called diagnostic, do not provide casual evidence. Frequently, descriptive research attempts to determine to extend of differences in needs, attitudes, and opinions among subgroups.

Casual research.

The main goal of causal research is to identify cause of effect relationship between variables. Exploratory and descriptive research normally precede cause-and-effect relationship studies,. In causal studies researchers typically have an expectation about the relationship to be explained, such as predicting the influence of price, packaging, advertising, and l the like on sales. Thus, researchers must quite knowledgeable about the subject. Ideally the managers wants to establish that one event(say, anew package) is the means for producing another event (an increase in sales). Causal research attempts to establish that when we do on thing, another thing will follow. The word cause is common in everyday conversation, but from scientific research perspective a causal relationship is impossible to prove. Nevertheless, researchers seek certain types of evidence to help them understand and predict relationships.
A typical study has management change one variable (for example, advertising) and then observe the effect on another variable (such as sales). Some evidence for causality from the fact that the cause preceded the effect. In other words, having an appropriate causal order of events, or temporal sequence, is one criterion for causality that must be met to be able to measure a relationship If consumer behavior theorist to show that attitude change causes a behavior change, one criterion that must be established is that attitude must precede the behavior change in time.
In the above example, some evidence of concomitant variation exists because advertising and sales appear to be association between the variables-reasoning suggests that no causal relationship exists. If two events vary together, the one event may be the cause: however, this by itself is not sufficient evidence for causality because the two events may have a common cause: that is, both may be influenced by this variable.
For Instance, large number of drawing occurred.. Most of us would not conclude that eating ice cream cause drowning: more likely, on that day beach was crowded and the number of people probably influenced both ice cream sales and drowning.
The effect could have been produced in other ways. Thus, causation requires more than concomitant variation and a proper time sequence between the occurrences of two events. There may be plausible alternative explanations for the observed relationship. A plurality of cause is possible.
Consider a presidential candidate who reduces advertising expenditures near the end of the primary campaign race and wins many mom delegates in the remaining primaries. To infer causality that reducing advertising increased the number of delegates might be inappropriate, because the presumed cause of the increase in delegates may not have been the real cause, it is more likely that near the end of the race, marginal candidate withdrew. The real cause wa unrelated to advertising.
In these examples the third variable that is the source of the spurious association is a very salient factor readily identifiable as the true influence of change. However, within the complex environment in which managers operate, identifying alternative or complex causal facts can be difficult.