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• Marketing research provides data to inform marketing strategies.
• It helps marketers identify prospects, problems, generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions, and monitor performance.

Marketing Concept Importance

• Crucial to the marketing concept because it enhances understanding of customer requirements, allowing you to deliver value better than competitors.
• Ensures marketing strategies are customer and data-driven.
• Reduces failure risks,improves decision-making.

Market Research Importance

• Helps businesses understand the external environment by analyzing the following factors:
• Market trends: Shifts in consumer behavior.
• Competitive landscape: Insight into competitors' strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Economic conditions: Impact of inflation and unemployment on consumer spending.
• Technological advancements: Monitors opportunities and threats from new technologies.
• Cultural and social factors: Observes Societal trends and cultural influences on consumer behavior.
• Legal and regulatory changes: Monitors compliance with laws and anticipating regulatory impacts.

Roles of Marketing Research

• Descriptive: Gathers market facts, such as demographics and market size.
• Diagnostic: Explains market phenomena, like sales declines.
• Predictive: Forecasts trends, like demand for new products.

Performing Marketing Research

• Should be performed before launching new products or entering new markets.
• Should be performed to gauge customer satisfaction.
• Should be performed when sales or market share decline.
• Should be performed to assess marketing campaign effectiveness.
• Should be performed when making strategic decisions about pricing and distribution.

Not Performing Marketing Research

• Should not be performed if the cost outweighs the potential benefits.
• Should not be performed if the decision is time-sensitive, and there's no time for research.
• Should not be performed if secondary data is readily available.
• Should not be performed if the outcome is unlikely to influence the decision.

Primary vs Secondary Research

• Primary research collects original data for a specific purpose; examples include surveys.
• Primary research strengths: tailored, relevant, and up-to-date.
• Primary research weaknesses: time-consuming, expensive, and requires expertise.
• Secondary research repurposes existing data; examples include industry reports.
• Secondary research strengths: cost-effective, quick, and broad in scope.
• Secondary research weaknesses: may be outdated, less reliable, or not specific.

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research

• Qualitative focuses on understanding reasons and motivations.
• Qualitative uses focus groups, interviews, and observations.
• Qualitative data is non-numerical (text, audio, video) which explores new ideas and generates hypotheses.
• Quantitative focuses on quantifying data from a sample.
• Quantitative uses surveys, experiments, and statistical analysis. Quantitative data is numerical (percentages, averages).
• Quantitative measures market size, tests hypotheses, and tracks performance.

In-House Research

• Choose in-house when the firm has ongoing needs, resources, and expertise.
• In-house research advantages include control, cost-effectiveness, and alignment with company goals.
• In-house research disadvantages are limited perspectives, potential bias, and higher setup costs.

External Agency Research

• Choose an external agency when lacking expertise, needing specialized skills or an unbiased perspective
• External research advantages include access to expertise, unbiased results, and scalability.
• External research disadvantages include higher costs, less control, and potential goal misalignment.

Internal Validity

• Shows how accurately a study establishes cause-and-effect relationships within the study itself.
• Example: Ensuring seasonality does not affect a price experiment.

External Validity

• Shows the extent of a study's findings to generalize across settings, populations, or contexts.
• Example: Determining if customer preferences in one city apply to other regions.

Marketing Research Process

• Begins With:
• Defining the problem and research objectives.
• Data Collection: Conducted through exploratory, descriptive, or causal research.
• Data Analysis: Analyze collected data to derive insights.
• Information Reporting: Prepare and present reports for informed decision-making.

Problem Definition

• Is essential as it clarifies the study's purpose.
• Ensures to only addresses relevant issues.
• Guides the selection of suitable research methods.
• Prevents waste resources on irrelevant data collection.

Symptom vs Problem

• Symptom: An observable measurable issue, such as declining sales.
• Problem: The root cause of a symptom, such as poor product quality.
• Importance: Addressing symptoms without solving the root problem leads to recurring issues.

Exploratory Research

• Used to explore and understand a problem.
• Employed as part of focus groups, interviews.
• Flexible and unstructured

Descriptive Research

• Describes population characteristics.
• Surveys and observations.
• Structured and quantitative.

Causal Research:

• Tests cause-and-effect relationships through experiments.
• Determines if one variable affects another.

Project vs Systems Approach

• The Project Approach focuses on specific problems.
• The Systems Approach provides ongoing marketing intelligence to support decision-making.

Errors

• Can occur at any stage of the marketing research process.
• Problem Definition :Misdefining the problem.
• Data Collection: Poor sampling or biased questions.
• Data Analysis : Incorrect statistical methods.
• Information Reporting: Misleading results.

Ethical Marketing Research

• Requires moral principles that guide behavior and ensures respondent rights
• Builds trust, maintains integrity of the research process/

Ethical Reasoning:

• Utility: Does the benefit outweigh the cost?
• Rights: Are human rights respected?
• Justice: Are benefits and costs distributed fairly?
• Respondent Rights: Includes the right to choose, safety, privacy, and to be informed.

Ethical Research

• Use common sense.
• align actions with your best self, make decisions publically, seek second opinions, avoid greed, speed, laziness, or haziness.
• Abstain from advocacy research and sugging/frugging.
• Advocacy Research: Designed to back a conclusion.
• Sugging/Frugging: Selling under guises of fundraising.
• Other Unethical Practices: Falsifying data or violating terms of service.

Problem Definition

• Should be Focused, relevant, and actionable.
• Managerial Decision Problem (MDP) vs Research Problems:
• MDP: Business problem from a manager’s view.
• Research Problems: Specific questions the research addresses.
• Discovery vs Strategy Research Problems
• Discovery: Explores the root of what
• Strategy: Focuses on what actions can improve

Types of Change

• Planned Change is anticipated.
• Unplanned Change is unexpected.
• Hypothesis is testable and includes "Men donate more to charity than women".
• Null Hypothesis signifies "no effect".
• Alternative Hypothesis signifies "difference".
• Construct defines concepts such as “Customer Satisfaction”.
• Variables are its element which measure “Product Quality”.

Hypotheses

• Should Define groups clearly
• Specify a Relationship
• Must be Testable

Importance of Exploratory Research:

• Helps refine the problem and generate and understand the hypotheses, before conducting structure research.

Types of Exploratory Studies

• Literature Search: Review existing data.
• Focus Groups: Small group discussions to explore opinions.
• Depth Interviews: One-on-one interviews with experts.
• Data Mining: Analyzing large data for patterns.
• Case Analyses: Studying specific cases for insight.
• Benchmarking: Compare leader practices.
• Ethnography/Netnography: Observe behavior.
• Projective Methods: uncover with hidden associations

Research Practices

• Depth Interviews: Interview experts.
• Nominal Groups: Follow idea generation.
• Ethnography/Netnography: Analyze behavior.
• Projective Methods: Employ word choices and sentence.

Literature Review

• Is used to gather existing knowledge
• Identify knowledge gaps
• Avoid duplicates efforts

Focus Groups

• Purpose: Generate qualitative.
• Practices: Use the best moderator.
• Focus on Homogeneity
• Obtain Recordings consent
• Encourage openness.

Causal Research

• Testing cause-and-effect through relationships
• This tests ads through causal relationships
• Cause (x) is the independent spends
• Effect is Dependent sales

Correlation

• Means variables are related, but does not result in causation.

Causal Inference

• Is based on
• Consistent Variation from x and y
• Time Order from the past
• Elimination: the effects and relationships

Experiments

• This can manipulate different types of experiment variables to see the changes
• Independent (x) is researched
• Dependent (y) is measured
• Extraneous is external factors.

Validity

• Internal: Confidence
• External: General results.

Experiments

• Lab: are internally high and externally low.
• Field are externally high
• Pre and Post measure different outcomes.
• Groups Compare different exposures.
• A/B tests and different variables.

Test Markets

• Standard: Geographical testing.
• Controlled: Specific testing. Simulated is testing.
• Standard is highly rated and expensive.
• Control is cheap.
• Simulated is the cheapest.

Choosing Markets

• Requires different criteria
• Control, representation, distribution, isolation.