Marketing, in the broadest sense, encompasses the entire system for bringing goods and services to actual and potential users. It includes understanding customer desires and designing, distributing, and informing potential customers of the means to satisfy these desires. Research in marketing may examine how a market operates from a socioeconomic view or it may study how consumers (either individual or institutional) respond to the marketing activities of suppliers. This, in turn, leads to questions of how to manage these activities to better serve suppliers or the community as a whole.
The study of buyer behavior includes modeling individual and group perceptions, preferences, judgments, and choices. Research in marketing management may focus on product and service design, sales response function modeling, marketing strategy, pricing, measuring the effectiveness of communications efforts, and incentive and control mechanisms for managing channel relationships. Marketing research methods seek to improve study design as well as data collection and analysis to further organizational objectives.