Chapter 10

Question 1

three key problems have remained with both market research methods and inferences

Answer 1

1. Conducting market research is expensive.
2. Generated data are discrete.
3. Intrusiveness.

Question 2

What is the problem with generated discrete data?

Answer 2

You only have the data for the time periods during which market research was conducted. Trying to make these data more continuous (i.e., fill time gaps by increasing the frequency of market research studies) is expensive and often impractical.

Question 3

Define the intrusiveness issue

Answer 3

Instead of the true customer “voice,” you only “hear” how consumers react to questions you pose to them in surveys and focus groups. In other words, what you “hear” always depends on what you ask. Collecting primary research data without an intrusion by a market researcher has been almost impossible.

Question 4

Multiple natural language processors are now available for market researchers looking to

Answer 4

quickly assess the degree to which consumer-generated content is positive, negative, or neutral.

Question 5

Identify key advantages and weaknesses by

Answer 5

looking for correlations between certain keywords and volumes and the sentiment of consumer-generated content.

Question 6

Free Social Media Marketing Tools

Answer 6

Google Alerts or SocialMention

Question 7

Although social media market research has many advantages over traditional ways of collecting consumer information, the following caveats must be kept in mind:

Answer 7

• Sentiment scoring and related “natural language processing” (NLP) algorithms are not perfect.
• You don’t know much about the sample (if anything at all). It is certainly unlikely to be representative of the general population.
• The people doing all the talking might be an extremely vocal minority.
• It works best for large, well-known consumer-facing brands, for which consumers generate lots of content every day.
• The technology behind social media monitoring uses keywords, so the data used for the analysis could become contaminated if your keywords (product, brand) are generic or used by others.