The article substantiates the importance of marketing research in the system of marketing management of retail chains, summarizes the organizational aspects of marketing research, identifies their functions, goals and objectives, the specifics of which are due to the characteristics of retail as a customer-oriented business. Emphasis is placed on organizational innovations of the last decade of the XX century, which shifted the center of influence on customers from manufacturers to retailers, updated the new tasks of marketing-oriented management in the retail system, most of which are related to marketing research. Methods, formats of organization and the order of marketing research in trade are considered. It is concluded that the retail marketing management system creates a steady demand for tools that support business decisions based on the needs of the end user, for marketing analysts who know how to work with a wide range of tools, for modern methods of collecting and visual presentation of marketing information . It is noted that the main requirement for tools and methods of marketing research is diversity, multiformat, nativeness, intuitive interfaces, and the main innovation is the combination of "offline" research with "online", which allows research much faster, cheaper and can cover very large arrays of respondents