final Flashcards
Marketing Research
- Specifies information
- Designs the method for collecting information
- Manages the data collection process
- Analyzes and communicates the results
By conducting marketing research on the various factors in the marketing environment,
you can do your best to remove any kind of uncertainty
Marketing Research allows businesses:
- To better understand their products/services
- To monitor their competitors
- To understand industry market trends
The Marketing Research Process
- Formulate the Problem
- Determine Research Design*
- Gather Data
- Analyze & Interpret Data
- Prepare the Research Report
Three major categories of groups conducts marketing research
- Producers of products and services
- Advertising agencies
- Marketing research companies
Producers of products and services
Organizations that produce products or deliver services for businesses or consumers often conduct research designed to develop and market their products and services
Examples of producers of products and services
a. Ex: ESPN, Unilever & Apple – Have internal marketing research departments
b. Target, Walmart & Zara – Operate research departments to gather information about consumer preferences, store image, etc
Advertising agencies
Conducts research designed to help create and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns
Examples of advertising agencies
a. Ex: Marketing and Advertising agencies – Testing alternative approaches to the words or graphics used in an ad, effectiveness of celebrity spokespeople, etc.
b. INNOCEAN Worldwide
Marketing research companies
Companies that specialize in conducting marketing research
Examples of marketing research companies
a. Ex: Nielsen Holdings – Provides product-movement data for grocery stores and drug stores, as well as television ratings
Other firms specialized in custom-designed research:
- Field service – data collection
- Limited-service – both data collection and analyze the data
- Government agencies, trade associations and universities
Problem formulation process
- Meet with the client
- Clarify the problem/opportunity
- State the manager’s decision problem
- Develop a full range of possible research problems
- Select a research problem that best address the manager’s decision problem
- Prepare and submit the research request agreement to the client
What occurs in 1. Meet with the client
- Need to gather as much information as possible about the problem at hand
- Get the broader context more than a more specific task
- Is issue planned or unplanned change
Planned change
more future-oriented and being proactive (i.e., increase revenue)
Unplanned change
issues that occur unexpectedly (i.e., new technology)
What occurs in 2. Clarify the problem/opportunity
- Help managers get precisely to the heart of the problem
- Researchers are responsible for ensuring that root causes and clear paths of actions are determined
- One of the toughest steps
What occurs in 4. Develop a full range of possible research problems
- Each of the possible research problems beings with an action word (ex. “investigate”, “determine”, etc)
- Describes information to be uncovered that might help solve the decision problem
Managers decision problem describes…
the manager’s view of the situation
Research problem
a restatement of the decision problem in research terms, from the researcher’s perspective
What occurs in 5. Select a research problem that best address the manager’s decision problem
- Review each possible research problem
- The trade-off between the benefits of the information to be obtained,
- The importance of the decision problem(s) to be made,
- And the costs of obtaining that information
Research Request Agreement
a document prepared by the research team after meeting with the decision maker that summarizes the problem and the information that is needed to address it
What are the sections in a research request agreement
- Background
- Decision problem
- Research problems
- Use
- Population
- Logistics
Decision problem
The basic problem facing the manager, for which marketing research is intended to provide answers