At its core, the rationale for market research is to help make better decisions.  Market research can discover, validate, and reduce risk.  It can improve ROI, improve management confidence, and expose competitive threat.  And it can also be the worst thing that an organization can do.

Even when done perfectly, traditional market research – both qualitative (focus groups, interviews, etc) and quantitative (surveys) – has one inherent flaw:  it takes time.