For the industries, you have to answer it by yourself to make it make sense. Normally there are two different type of job doing marketing research: research company like IDC, they do marketing research and provide report to customer, or the receive a very specific assignment from a client and do research: for example, to study the customer preference of a new PDA in China.
Another type of responsiblity is in companies. Like product manager need to understand the martket, competition, customer to decide whether to launch a new product in a new market. Or as a internal advisor to provide industry report (normally with the help from IDC or CCID etc) and provide high level suggestion to exec team, that's called strategy. |