W9 Marketing

What is market research?

Research that looks at markets, trends and how customers behave. It represents the process of gathering, analysing and interpreting data

What is qualitative research? Give 2 methods

Gathering verbal data to understand consumers, gaining in-depth insights into behaviour

• Focus groups

• In-depth interviews

What is quantitative reseach? Give a method

Gathering numerical data which can be generalised to the whole population

• Surveys using a structured questionnaire

What is involved in the market research process?

• Research planning

• Explatory research

• Main data collection

• Data analysis and interpretation

• Report writing and presentation

What is included in research planning?

• Initial contact (Realising problem requires information)

• Research brief

  • Includes requirements, what they want to understand, purpose, information sources

• Research proposal

  • Defines what marketing research agency promises to do for its client, how much it’ll cost, a statement of objectives

What is explatory research?

Involves the preliminary exploration of a research area prior to the main data-collection stage

What is the purpose of explatory research?

Guards agasint sin of ommission and admission

• Sin of omossion: Not researching a topic enough, or failing to provide sufficient respondents in a group to allow meaningful analysis

• SIn of admission: Collecting data that are irrelevant to the marketing problem or using too many groups for analysis purposes and increasing sample size

What are some forms of explatory research?

• Secondary research

• Qualitative research

• Consultation with experts

• Observation

What is secondary research?

Data which comes to the researcher second hand

E.g. Internal company records, reports, and previously carried out research

External sources may be government statistics, publishers or reports and directories, banks, newspapers

What is included in a focus group?

• Unstrutured/structured discussions between a moderator or group leader and a group of consumers (6-12 people)

• Moderator has a list of topics of discussion, allows group freedom to dicuss

• Findings can provide insight into consumer motivations and behaviour

• Disadvantage: Highly subjective, the quality of results may depend on the skills of the moderator

What is included in in-depth interviews?

• Interviewing cosnumers individually about a topic

• Method is used when input of others may inhibit honest answers and viewpoints

• Weakness: Highly subjective, small sample size, difficult to generalise, interviewer may caus bias

What is ethnography?

• A form of observation that involves detailed and prolonged observation of consumers

• It enables researches to get closer to consuemrs to understand their behaviour in new and more detailed ways

What is involved in consultation with experts?

• Involves interviewing people who may not form part of the target market but who can provide important marketing-related insights

• They can provide valuable background information, and can be useful for predicting future trends and development