Marketing Research

Marketing Research
A systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization. Marketing research gives marketers insights into customer motivations, purchase behavior, and satisfaction.

Market Research Process

Defining the problem and research objective Developing the research plan for collecting information Implements the research plancollecting and analyzing the data Interpreting and reporting the findings

Defining the Problem & Research Objectives

1st Step - Marketing managers and researchers must work closely together to define the problem and agree on research objectives. The three main types of research are: *Exploratory Research *Descriptive Research *Casual Research

Exploratory Research
To gather preliminary information that will help define the problem and suggest hypotheses.

*Gathering information about how many consumers visit the social media sites of BET & MTV.

Researchers collaborate on research projects, which involve practical problems of hazardous substance management as well as long-term, exploratory research.

Descriptive Research
Describe things, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers who buy the product. *Gathering information describing the demographic of who primarily watches BET & MTV.

Casual Research
Test hypotheses about cause and effect relationships. *Interviewing people who meet the demographics found in the hypothesis.

If a clothing company currently sells blue denim jeans, causal research can measure the impact of the company changing the product design to the color white.

Developing the Research Plan

Developing a research plan includes
It is usually a written proposal about what is important about the company and there goals ahead

Specific research plan includes the following:

1. Spell out the specific research approach 2. Contact methods 3. Sample plans 4. Instruments that researchers will use to gather new data

Written Proposal
The research plan should be presented in a written proposal

The proposal should cover:

1. The management problems addressed 2. Research objectives 3. The information to be obtained, 4. The way the results will help management decision making 5. Research cost

Gathering the Information

Research Approaches Observation Survery Experiment Contact methods Mail Telephone Personal Online Sampling Plan Research Instruments Questionnaire Mechanical instruments

Sampling unit Sample size Sampling Procedure

Primary Data Collection

Primary data Information collected for the specific purpose at hand. This research includes information and facts that are not mentioned in Secondary Data that target specific information that is necessary or needed.
In most cases companies must collect this data to carefully evaluate the quality of their secondary information. It has to be: relevant, accurate, current, & unbiased

Primary Data decisions include:

1. Research approaches 2. Contact methods 3. Sampling plan 4. Research instruments

Gathering Secondary Data

What is secondary data? Secondary data is information that had been previously gathered for another reason and therefore already exists

Secondary Data Advantages

It can be obtained quicker and cheaper than primary data It provides a company data that the individual company cannot collect on its own for two reasons:
The data may not be directly available The data may be too expensive for the company to collect

Secondary Data Disadvantages

The needed information may not exist Researchers can rarely obtain all the data that they need from secondary sources Data that is found may not be very useful or usable A researcher must make sure that the secondary data is relevant, accurate, current and impartial

Finding Secondary Data

Commercial Online Databases Computerized collections of information available form online commercial sources or via the Internet.
Commercial online databases- marketing researches can conduct their own searches of secondary data sources Web search engines- well designed web searches can prove to be very helpful