Week Two Flashcards
Overview of the marketing research process.
Which problem is action oriented?
Management decision problem (MDP)
Which problem is info oriented?
Marketing research problem (MRP)
Examples of MDP:
- Should a new product be introduced?
- Should the advertising campaign be changed?
- Should the price of the brand be increased?
- Develop package for a new product?
- Increase store traffic?
- Increase market penetration through the opening of new stores?
- Decide which merchandise will be available for purchase over the internet?
Examples of MRP (building on from the MDP examples above):
- To determine consumer preferences and purchase intentions for the proposed new product.
- To determine the effectiveness of the current advertising campaign.
- To determine the price elasticity of demand and the impact on sales and profits of various levels of price changes.
- To evaluate alternative package designs.
- To measure current image of the store.
- To evaluate prospective locations.
- To determine consumers’ confidence in purchasing different categories of products unseen.
What are some unethical problems during the market research stage?
- conducting unnecessary research.
- using findings for specific clients for other projects.
- misleading / inappropriate questions.
- embarrassing or stressing the respondents.
- not maintaining anonymity of respondents.
- hiding results.
Codes of ethics usually includes:
- voluntary participation
- informed consent
- right to refuse to answer any question
- right to withdraw
- confidentiality
- participants access to findings.
What is exploratory research?
Inductive research. Discovery of new constructs or new relationships between known constructs. Phenomena are observed and a conclusion drawn on the basis of the information collected. Employs unstructured subjective inductive ‘interpretive’ methods. Small samples. The goal is to provide an understanding of the problem.
What is decision set theory?
Our minds will only handle 2 to 6 options to consider over in our purchase decision.
What is conceptualisation?
Establishing relationships between variable in an analytical model.
What are constructs?
- Intangible concepts, which while not readily observable, are thought to be important.
- They are not possible to measure with just one question. We need to define the constructs in order to measure.
- They are hypothetical variables. It is specified such as that it is a variable. Eg. Has varying values.
- All constructs are variables, but not all variables are constructs. E.g. Personal identity.
The MRP will usually contain a:
construct which needs to be broken down into measurable objectives. Examples:
- brand ‘image’
- market ‘position’
- student ‘satisfaction’
Deductive (descriptive or experimental) research is:
Derive a hypothesis from theory and gather data to test the hypothesis. Employs structured objective deductive survey methods. Large samples. Goal is to describe characteristics of a phenomenon.
Independent variable (IV) examples include:
- advertising
- discount
- quality
- service
- sales promotion
Dependent variable (DV) examples include:
- sales volume
- store loyalty
- total sales
Examples of constructs:
- position
- personality
- image
- quality
- value