The document discusses identifying market needs and conducting market research. It explains that market needs refer to customers' functional needs, desires, and goals. Market segmentation involves dividing customers into groups with similar characteristics. The six key steps to market research are defining questions, determining needed data, collecting data, analyzing data, taking action, and evaluating results. Understanding competition is also important. A competitive analysis identifies competitors' strengths, weaknesses, products, prices and strategies. Maintaining customer loyalty also requires offering high quality products at competitive prices and addressing unmet customer needs.