MKT RESEARCH EXAM REVIEW

Marketing Research:

Links an organization to its market through the

gathering of information

Marketing research facilitates identification of market ____________ & _______________ and corresponding actions

opportunities & threats

What is the general marketing research process?

Design → Collect → Analyze → Interpret → Communicate.

Management Decision makers do what?

Use the research findings to make marketing decisions.

Characteristics of Management decision makers include:

-Big picture

-Time/ cost conscious

-Want no surprises

What do Marketing researchers do?

Collect, analyze, interpret, and communicate information.

Characteristics of marketing researchers include:

-Scientific thinkers- Love to explore new phenomena

-Okay with long time frame and don't care about costs

-Love surprises and research challenges

Iceberg principle:

Managers see only 10% of a problem (the visible symptoms), while 90% of the true problem remains hidden beneath the surface

Marketing research enables what?

performance monitoring and understanding

When it comes to marketing research, the more information....

the better the decision making

Marketing research is a systematic process:

-Communicating findings to decision makers

-Designing methods for collecting information

-Managing the information collection process

-Analyzing and interpreting results

Marketing research can be applied to a wide variety of problems involving the what?

the marketing mix (aka, "the four Ps")

Reasons to conduct research marketing research:

When additional information is needed, when sufficient resources (time and money) are available, and when the benefits of the research outweigh the gathering costs.

Reasons to NOT conduct research marketing research:

If the problem can be resolved using existing internal records or judgment, if time/money is lacking, or if research would reveal proprietary strategies to competitors

Perceptual mapping:

Used to picture the relative position of products on two or more

product dimensions important to consumer purchase decisions (also performance/importance matrices)

What are the most common research tasks in integrated marketing communications?

- Advertising effectiveness studies

- Promotion mix decisions

Ethnographic research:

study consumer behavior as activities embedded in a cultural context and laden with identity

is Ethnographic research qualitative or qualitative?

qualitative

Internal marketing research:

Organizational units that reside within a company

What are some benefits of internal marketing research?

- Research method consistency

- Shared, private information across the company

- Lower research costs (per study)

- Generalist

External marketing research:

Perform all aspects of the research

What are some benefits of external marketing research?

- Objective

- Specialized talent

- Greater flexibility in scheduling studies and specific project requirements

What are some potential ethical pitfalls for research providers?

- Unethical pricing

- Unnecessary or unwarranted research services

- Client confidentiality issues

- Use of "black-box" methodologies

Abuse of Respondents:

Includes failing to provide promised incentives, misleading participants about interview length, using fake sponsors, causing physical/psychological harm, and failing to debrief respondents after using deception. Unethical practices also include sugging/frugging (selling/fundraising under the guise of research) and de-anonymizing consumer data.

Client Misconduct:

Clients act unethically when :

-requesting proposals with no intent to hire

-falsely promising long-term work for cheap rates

-or overstating study results

Respondent misconduct:

Respondents act unethically by:

- providing dishonest answers

-lying to qualify for incentives.

Branded "black-box" methodologies:

Offered by research firms that are branded

- Do not provide information about how the methodology works

Curbstoning:

Data collection personnel filling out surveys for fake respondents

Subject debriefing:

Fully explaining to respondents any deception that was used during research

sugging/frugging:

Claiming that a survey is for research purposes and then asking for a sale or donation

De-anonymizing data:

Combining different publicly available information, usually unethically, to determine consumers' identities, especially on the Internet

Researchers might perform poor or unethical research because of:

Fear of losing the client

Client pressure to prove a predetermined conclusion

Cost cutting

Qualitative data:

collection of data in the form of text or images using open-ended questions, observation, or 'found' data (OPEN ENDED) understanding- "the why"

What are the goals/ objectives with qualitative data?

Discover/ identify:

-new ideas

-thoughts/ feelings

-preliminary understanding of relationships

-understanding of hidden psychological and social processes

What type of research is qualitative research?

Exploratory

What type of questions are qualitative?

-open-ended

-unstructured

-probing

Time of execution for Qualitative data :

relatively short time frame

Representativeness for qualitative research:

Small samples- only the sampled individuals

What are the types of analysis for qualitative methods?

-Debriefing

-subjective

-interpretive

Generalizability levels for qualitative research are....

limited

Value of qualitative research:

Used in exploratory research designs to:

- Gather background information

- Clarify the research problems

- Create hypotheses or establish research priorities

(Results may be sufficient for decision making in certain situations)

Quantitative data:

uses formal standard questions and predetermined response options in surveys of large samples (the validation) -typically a longer time frame

Goals/ objectives of quantitative research:

Validation of facts, estimates, relationships

Quantitative research is what type of research?

Descriptive and casual

Quantitative research has what type of questions?

Mostly structured

Time of execution for quantitative research

Typically significantly longer time frame

Representativeness for quantitative research:

Larger samples with proper sampling can represent population

quantitative research is what type of analysis?

-Statistical

-descriptive

-causal predictions

Researcher skills for quantitative research

Statistical analysis, interpretation of numbers

Generalizability levels for quantitative research

Generally very good, can infer facts and relationships

When would you use Quantitative research?

when you need to answer questions with numbers, test specific hypotheses, and find patterns across a large group

What are some methods of quantitative research?

surveys/ questionnaires

experiments

observations

polls

Advantages of qualitative research:

Data can be collected relatively quickly or may already exist as naturally occurring conversations on the internet

-richness of the data

-accuracy of recording marketplace behaviors (validity)

-Preliminary insights into building models and scale measurements- insight from researchers with training in social & behavioral scenes

Disadvantages of qualitative research:

Lack of generalizability, low reliability

-Difficulty in estimating the magnitude of phenomena being investigated

-Difficulty finding well-trained investigators, interviewers and observers

-Reliance on subjective interpretive skills of the researcher

Advantages of quantitative research:

precision but less insight- large samples

(offers high generalizability and predictive capability, but typically requires longer execution times and structured frameworks.)

Customers are more satisfied with what research method because it is rich in data and more detailed?

Qualitative data

Disadvantages of quantitative research:

-Overly focused approach may cause researcher to miss key elements

-Weak for understanding people's interpretations

-Weak for discovering new phenomena

Which research method takes longer to do? Qualitative or Quantitative?

quantitative research

Focus groups:

Small group discussions (8-12 participants) guided by a trained moderator using a moderator's guide. Results are evaluated through debriefing analysis and content analysis.

Advantages of focus groups:

Stimulate new ideas, thoughts, and feelings about a topic (group dynamics)

Foster understanding of consumer behavior

Allow client participation- Elicit wide range of responses

Bring together hard-to-reach informants

Projective Techniques:

Indirect questioning methods (such as word association, sentence completion, and ZMET) designed to reveal hidden, subconscious feelings.

Observation:

Recording behavioral patterns of people, objects, or events using direct human observation or technology-mediated tools.

Emerging Trends in Marketing Research:

Key trends include:

-an increased emphasis on secondary data, (information previously collected for some other problem)

-managing gatekeeper technologies (such as caller ID and cookie blocking)

Emerging technology in Marketing Research:

-leveraging new data acquisition technology (including social media monitoring, clickstream tracking, GPS, and neuromarketing).

-Globalization

-Marketing research repositioned to play a more important

role in strategy development

Secondary Research

information previously collected for some other problem or issue; used to examine marketing problems because of relative speed and cost-effectiveness of obtaining the data

Primary research:

research done firsthand for the first time

Reasons we focus on secondary data so much:

it is often easier, faster, and cheaper to obtain than collecting new primary data.

When Gatekeepers make people harder to reach what type of data becomes more useful?

secondary data

Internal secondary data:

Data collected by the individual company for accounting purposes or marketing activity reports

What are some advantages of internal secondary data?

Understand current customers and their buying behaviors

Tracking sales and performance over time

Identifying trends and patterns

Save time and money

External secondary data:

Data collected by outside agencies such as the federal government, trade associations, or periodicals

Disadvantages of secondary data:

1. Relevance of the data (Purpose)

2. Accuracy - Units of Measurement/Category mismatch

(apples & oranges) -Age of data/methodology/credibility/bias

3. Comparability with other sources (consistency)

Internal sources of secondary data:

sales invoices, accounts receivable reports, quarterly sales reports, and sales activity logs.

External sources of secondary data:

popular media, scholarly publications, government records (such as NAICS data), and commercial syndicated sources.

Literature reviews:

a comprehensive examination of existing secondary information related to a research topic. It helps clarify research questions, identify useful measurement scales and methodologies, suggest hypotheses, and construct conceptual research models.

Literature reviews can help conceptualize a model that...

summarizes the relationships you hope to predict

exploratory research:

generates insights that will help define the problem situation confronting the researcher or improves the understanding of consumer motivations, attitudes, and behavior that are not easy to access using other research methods

descriptive research

collects quantitative data to answer research questions such as who, what, when, where, and how

casual research:

collects data that enables decision makers to determine cause-and-effect relationships between two or more variables

independent variables:

the variables or construct that predicts or explains the outcome variable of interest (impacts/ causes the other variable)

dependent variables:

the variable or construct researchers are seeking to explain (Is impacted/ affected by the other variable)

What method of research is Content analysis?

qualitative research method

Exploratory research:

Type of research that helps you generate insight to help you answer a problem

Gatekeeper technology:

refers to tools used by individuals to screen, limit, or block unwanted intrusive contacts or data collection attempts, such as caller ID, call blocking, and deleting or blocking browser cookies