Using findings to make decisions

1. Research only earns its cost if it changes a decision, so findings are organised into tables and charts, read for a pattern, then acted on.
2. The findings feed straight into the marketing mix: what to sell, what to charge for it, how to promote it and where to sell it.
3. Quantitative findings show the size of a pattern and qualitative findings explain what is causing it, and a business normally wants both before committing money.
4. How far the business can act on the findings depends on its type, because a sole trader can change a menu on Monday morning while Tesco has to trial a change in a few stores before rolling it out to hundreds.

Market size and market share

1. Market size is measured either by value, the total £ spent, or by volume, the number of units sold, so the same market can be described as worth £40m a year or as selling 2 million units a year.
2. Market size tells a business whether a market is big enough to be worth entering, and whether it is growing or shrinking.
3. Market share tells it how it is performing against rivals, which its own sales figures alone cannot, because sales can rise while competitors grow faster still.

Calculating and interpreting market share

1. The formula is not supplied in the exam, so learn it and write it out before you substitute anything.

1. A bakery chain sells £3.5m of bread in a regional market worth £25m in total, and the year before it sold £2.4m in a market worth £20m.

1. A 14% share means £14 of every £100 spent on bread in that market goes to this bakery and £86 goes to its rivals, so it is a serious player but a long way from dominating.
2. The rise from 12% to 14% tells the owner that sales grew faster than the market as a whole, because the chain's own sales rose from £2.4m to £3.5m while the market grew only from £20m to £25m, so it has won customers from rivals rather than simply riding a growing market.

Reading data from tables and charts

1. Read the title, the row and column headings, the units and the time period before you look at a single figure.
2. Tables give exact figures, which is what you need for a calculation or a precise comparison between two years.
3. Bar charts compare quantities across categories, so read each bar against the scale rather than judging heights by eye.
   1. If one rival's bar reaches £60,000 and another's reaches £30,000 the first sells twice as much, but only if the vertical axis starts at zero.
4. Line graphs show a trend over time, so describe the direction and the speed of the change and look for a pattern that repeats each year.
5. Pie charts show proportions of a whole, which makes them the natural way to present market share.

Drawing a conclusion from the figures

1. A café owner's sales table shows takings of £41,000 in quarter 1, £46,000 in quarter 2, £58,000 in quarter 3 and £39,000 in quarter 4.
2. The pattern is a summer peak and a winter dip rather than a business in decline, because quarter 4 is still close to quarter 1.
3. Measure the change rather than describing it, rounding the percentage to one decimal place.

1. A fall of almost a third from quarter 3 to quarter 4 is big enough to plan for, so the owner should cut winter staffing hours and promote hot food from October rather than conclude that the café is failing.
2. Sense-check the data before spending on the strength of it, because a striking figure taken from 20 responses or from a single week is a weak basis for a decision.