Trampled peanut hulls littering the most heavily traveled store aisles and even heaped up in front of displays of merchandise of special interest to customers. In short, the merchant learned how they acted in the store and what they wanted and observed their behavior. Basically, marketing research is just what the merchant did with the peanuts. Find out what catches customers' attention by observing their actions and drawing conclusions from what you see. Marketing research is an organized way of finding objective answers to questions every business must answer to succeed.
Marketing research does, however, try to learn about markets scientifically.
That's pretty obvious. Just as obvious is the fact that nothing could be simpler than selling people what they do want. Big business has to do market research to find that out. The same reason holds for small business. Experience can be a two-edged sword, though, since it comprises a tremendous mass of facts acquired at random over a number of years.