Case 2.

3 Bharat Sports Daily (A)

The main purpose of the case is to let participants know about the various steps involved in conducting a
research study. The solution given is only a suggested one. Different instructors may use different
approaches for the purpose.

Ans.1. The Management decision problem in this case is whether or not to launch a sports daily?

Ans.2. To be able to take decision as to whether the sports daily should be launched or not, the research
problem would be

o Is a need felt for such a sports daily?

If a need is felt for the sports daily and the amount of need is large enough to be economically
sustainable, the company would go for the sports daily.

Ans.3. We have to find out whether a need is felt for such a sports daily? For this a survey needs to be
conducted. The question which arises is that who would be our respondents. Please note that
respondents are also called unit of analysis from which information is sought. Identification of
unit of analysis is the main question to be answered first. You may pose this question to the
students. They would come with different answers. However, the following points are to be kept
in mind while choosing the unit of analysis for the study. Naturally, the respondent should be a
sports lover. A person can satisfy his interest for sports by looking through the general magazine,
sports magazine or by viewing a sport video. However, this choice will be ruled out since they
provide stale information as videos could be outdated and many of these magazines could be
weekly, fortnightly, monthly etc. The other way a person could satisfy his urge for sports could
be through TV and radio. The problem with these options is that they would be on particular
time, at which respondent may not be free (please note that the case facts state very clearly that
cable TV was not launched in the Indian market at the time for which this case pertains).
Therefore, the timing is a big problem. The only alternative from where the respondent could get
fresh news about sports could be the sports section of the daily newspaper. There are many
newspapers like Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, The Hindu, Asia Age etc. that
are available in Delhi where the sports section of the daily newspaper is available from where
respondent can get the latest news about sports. Now, we can narrow down our choice of unit of
analysis to those people who read the sports section of the daily newspaper. If such people are
satisfied with the sports section of the daily newspaper, there wont be any need felt for launching
the sports daily.

The first step in our study would be to identify whether a person qualifies to be a part of the
study. If a person doesnt read the sports section of the daily newspaper, he or she could not
qualify to be a part of the study. Now how many respondents are to be chosen (sample size)
would depend upon various factors like the amount of budget for the field survey etc. These
issues would be taken up in Chapter 9 on Sampling. The objective here is to make the students
realize the importance of sampling while conducting a research study.

Once we have selected our respondents, the question would be how to measure the satisfaction
level with the sports section of the newspaper which the respondent reads. Please note that as
mentioned earlier since different newspapers are available and therefore satisfaction level for
them is likely to be different. Therefore the survey should comprise of respondents that read the
sports section of different newspapers. You may raise a question in the class to the students as to
how to measure the satisfaction level. The general response among the students would likely to
be

Are you satisfied with the sports section of the daily newspaper?

This is however not the right way of asking the question. This is because the satisfaction
comprises of various elements/attributes and the respondent may be satisfied with some of them
and may not be satisfied with others. Therefore there is a need for multiple items question on
satisfaction. The question listed above was a single item scale. The advantage of asking a
multiple item scale is that it helps you to identify the problem areas and would guide in
incorporating those attributes which are scoring poor in the present sports section of the
newspaper. Further, the question should try to judge the degree of satisfaction/dissatisfaction
with the sports section of the daily newspaper. We would give you some illustrative questions
which will help you to judge the satisfaction level on various attributes. (This is a separate topic
and you will announce in the class that the details of these would be covered in Chapter 9
ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT AND SCALING of the book.)
Please rate the following attributes of the sports section of the daily newspaper that you read on a
5-point scale where 1 = very poor, 2 = poor, 3 = average, 4 = good, and 5 = very good.

a) Ability to retain the interest of the readers ___________

b) Coverage of the sports section ___________
c) Quality of pictures ___________
d) Layout of the sports section ___________
e) Quantity of pictures ___________
f) Objectivity in coverage ___________

The above six are just illustrative attributes. One can generate a long list through exploratory
research which is carried out using informal interviews with the respondents, focus group
discussion, reviewing of the literature, analysis of secondary data and cases and so on. Please
note that there are six attributes mentioned above, the maximum score for a respondent would be
30 and minimum score would six. Please note that higher the score, higher the level of
satisfaction and lower the chances of launching of sports daily. At this point we have to decide a
cut-off point below which we assume that the respondents are not satisfied with the sports section
of the daily newspaper. The selection of the cut-off point could be arbitrary and it would vary
from researcher to researcher. However it is advised to keep a conservative value as this would
give you a very pessimistic estimate of people who are interested in sports daily. Suppose a cut-
off point of 15 is chosen, therefore it would be desirable to note the proportion of respondents in
the total survey who score below 15. This would give you the proportion of dissatisfied sports
lover. Again care has to be taken with respect to the newspaper they read as the results could vary
depending upon the choice of the newspaper. In case a respondent reads more than one
newspaper, to make the things simple, he or she may be asked to respond specific to one
particular newspaper.

Having obtained the proportion of dissatisfied people from the different newspapers, a total of the
dissatisfied numbers for the sample can be estimated. Now knowing the circulation of
newspapers and having an estimate of the sports lover (those who read the sport section of the
newspaper) a total number of dissatisfied people for the population can be estimated. But this is
not our market size. This is because as with the case with any typical newspaper, a sport daily
could also be read by four to five people. This would give us a rough estimate of the total
demand.
In case we get an economically favourable number, one would be interested in knowing the
attributes on which the sports daily must concentrate. For this it is very important that we
analyze each of the above six items individually and wherever majority of the respondent have
given a poor score would be the one where the sports daily should concentrate.

We would also need to get information on the people with their interests and hobbies. This is
because the advertisers can be approached so that they can advertise for their products in this
sport daily. Also we need to know the preference for the timings of sports daily morning,
afternoon or evening etc. All these are called the characteristics of interest which have bearing
with the objectives of the study. These characteristics of interest are called independent variables
which have an impact on the dependent variable which would be the likely sales generated if
decision is taken to launch the sports daily.

As a last point before taking the decision, one has to look at the environmental conditions over
which the decision maker doesnt have any control. In the present case the environmental
condition could be the policy of the government to go in for cable TV which would go against the
assumptions of the case that there are no alternatives available to get fresh news on sports. These
environmental conditions are called extraneous variables.