Marketing is the process of developing and implementing a plan to identify, anticipate and satisfy consumer demand, in such a way as to make a profit in every planned marketing campaign. The two main elements of this plan are market research to identify and anticipate customer requirements and the planning of an appropriate marketing mix to meet these requirements. Market research involves gathering and recording information about consumers, market, product, and the competition in an organized way. The information is then analyzed and used to inform marketing decisions. There are three main ways of gathering information for market research: 1. From internal information already held by an organization, e.g. details of existing customers and their spending habits. 2. External primary information - i.e. information collected at first hand by interviewing customers and potential customers to get their views about a company, products and services. 3. External secondary information - using published sources of information e.g. those produced by marketing organizations about products, markets and brands. Market research helps firms to plan ahead rather than to guess ahead. A marketing problem is not a marketing research problem. It is necessary to define the marketing research problem first. For instance, the marketing problem for a soap could be: `Loss of market share.' The marketing research problem cannot be: `Studying loss of market share.' This will lead to no actionable solutions.