Paper Title
Effect of Marketing Research Practices on Business Performance: A Study of Business Firms in Australia

Abstract
In 2015, the global revenue for the market research industry was more than 44 billion U.S. dollars (Statista, 2017). According to the prescriptive literature, the prime value of marketing research lies in its contribution to improving the effectiveness of management decision making by reducing uncertainty and risks involved in decision making(Zikmund and Babin 2010; Zikmund, WardandWinzar et.al.2014).Marketing research can provide vital information to deal with uncertainty in the environment and for planning, organizing, forecasting and for identifying why something went wrong (Burns and Bush 2014;Kotler and Armstrong 2017; Malhotra Naresh2009; Zikmund and Babin 2010; Zikmund, WardandWinzar et.al.2014). However, despite the evidence of large global revenue for the marketing research industry and the widely acknowledged importance of marketing research in the prescriptive literature, a review of the literature shows that much of the discussion on the subject is largely prescriptive in nature, focusing on the methodological aspect of marketing research. For example, a great deal of the prescriptive literature provides extensive coverage of how marketing research should be done(e.g. Burns and Bush 2014; Kotler and Armstrong 2017; Malhotra Naresh2009; Zikmund and Babin 2010; Zikmund, Wardand Winzar et.al.2014) with particular attention given to issues pertaining to the development and conduct of marketing research but very little empiricalresearch has been conducted into whether successful firms in Australia differ from unsuccessful firms with respect to their marketing research practices. Therefore, this research was designed to determine if there are significant differences between high performing and low performing business firms in Australia with respect to their marketing research practices.