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Who should be in charge of market research: sales or marketing?
They both utilize market research in strategy development, who should own research duties?
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3 Answers
You must work in sales - no marketing person would ever ask this question unless they were fresh out of school!
Market research certainly has utility for sales, but by its nature, anything that supports sales is self-serving to some degree. If sales produces its own market research, they can call it market research, but outsiders won't view it as such - unless is has been produced at arms-length by a legit third party.
Anyone can dress up some data points and call it market research - which serves as a cloak of credibility, but anyone looking under the hood will be able to tell pretty quickly if the research is bona fide. The essence of market research is objectivity, and that usually doesn't go hand-in-hand with sales. Maybe biz dev, but not sales.
The Marketing department is a more appropriate home for market research - so long as it has a safe distance from sales. Small businesses usually mix them together, so you need to be careful here. Just think about the Chinese Wall concept used in banking where traders and research are prohibited from working together in any manner. This is in place for all the right reasons, and in my mind extends equally well to most any other industry.
I think sales should, that would be less work for us :) ... However, I'm afraid I haven't heard about any company in the World that would have this responsibility in the sales department :( ... unless marketing department "doesn't exist". (in that case, marketing is "hidden" in the sales dept. and btw., if you take any reasonable definition of marketing, sales is part of marketing... therefore in that particular case it should be sales & marketing dept.)
Most companies I've worked for and with have market research as part of marketing. But it can get really complicated depending on the size of the company. At times I've seen the function be part of business development which generally is considered sales but this business development team reported into the marketing team's leadership. So ultimately the same decision makers made the calls for both marketing and biz dev and market research.
Secondly, many companies outsource market research functions to... can you guess? ... market research companies. Often this is done on top of in-house resources. Take a look at Mintel's CompereMedia for example.
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