Marketing Research Concepts

Marketing Research

• Marketing research problem: Defines the needed information to solve a management problem and how that information can be obtained.
• Marketing research objective: States the specific information needed to solve the marketing problem.
• Management decision problem: Specifies the managerial action required to solve the problem.
• Research design: Planning to address research objectives and hypotheses.
• Trade-offs: Trade-offs typically involve research cost, quality, decision-making information, and time constraints, along with the type of research conducted.
• Descriptive research: Focuses on describing characteristics, associations, and relationships between variables. Examples include demographic and lifestyle characteristics and understanding associations between variables.
• Causal research: Investigates whether the value of one variable causes changes in another variable. It identifies cause-and-effect relationships.
• Causality conditions: Causality requires temporal sequence where the cause must precede the effect; concomitant variation where cause and effect occur together; and spurious association where other variables don’t explain the change in the dependent variable.
• Measuring causality: Dependent variable is influenced by independent variable.
• Secondary data: Data previously gathered, as distinct from primary data, collected specifically for a current study.
• Sources of secondary data: Internal company data (annual reports, etc.) and external data from organizations or people (e.g., government reports, news articles, etc.).
• Benefits of secondary data: It's cheaper, faster, and more convenient/accessible. It helps in clarifying, redefining research problems, finding solutions, and providing alternatives for primary data collection. It also flags potential problems and/or difficulties in a study and is helpful for background info and sample framing.
• Limitations of secondary data: Availability, relevance, and age of data; accuracy and sufficiency problems.
• Internet sources for secondary data: Newsgroups, blogs, and other websites for specific topics.

Qualitative Research

• Qualitative research: Findings are not quantifiable.
• Qualitative research examples: Examining attitudes, feelings, and motivations of heavy and light consumers. Defining characteristics of heavy wine consumers (e.g., age, income).
• Qualitative research - pros: Cheaper, smaller samples (thus lower cost), good way to understand in-depth motivations of consumers, improves the efficiency of quantitative research, involves open-ended questioning and probing.
• Qualitative research - cons: Doesn't distinguish minor differences in opinions; not always representative of the population of interest.
• Focus groups: Learn and understand what people have to say about a topic and why; led by a moderator, involves in-depth discussions, crucial for success, group interaction is essential, an aspect of qualitative research, used often in consumer goods companies.
• Participants: Criteria for selecting participants are established, growing trend of choosing influentials, who are involved in influencing trends, using word-of-mouth to convince others.
• Moderator skills: Conducting a group properly, interacting effectively with the client, good listening and observation skills, being genuinely interested in people, behaviors, and opinions, identifying what's being said and interpreting body language, remaining objective and flexible, attentive to detail.

Focus Groups

• Focus groups format: Written outline of topics, based on research objectives and client information to lead through three stages (establishing rapport, provoking intensive discussions, and summarizing significant conclusions and testing limits of belief).
• Focus group length: Typically 90 minutes.
• Focus group analysis: Instantaneous analysis by the moderator and client observers, clients can hear and react to initial perceptions, can potentially bias future analysis.
• Focus group advantages: Stimulates new ideas through interactions between respondents, observation of customers in a one-way mirror; observes customers from behind a one-way mirror.

Individual Depth Interviews (IDIs)

• IDIs: One-on-one interviews to gather detailed answers from respondents.
• IDIs use: Non-directive techniques to uncover hidden motivations.
• IDI advantage: Eliminates group pressure, respondents feel like the focus of attention, heightened awareness, more time for each interview to encourage new info, respondents can be probed to reveal in-depth motivations, more flexibility in questioning directions.
• IDI disadvantages: Interviewer can become more sensitive to nonverbal feedback, can be conducted anywhere, more expensive than focus groups, doesn't generate as much client involvement, can't leverage group dynamics for reactions, success is dependent on interviewer skills and proper interpretation.

Projective Techniques

• Projective techniques: Used to gain insight by delving below surface responses to elicit true feelings and uncover defense mechanisms. Participants are given incomplete tasks or ambiguous stimuli to respond to.
• Methods: Word association, analogies, personification, sentence completion, cartoon tests, consumer drawings, story telling, and third-person techniques.

Observation Research

• Observation research: Recording patterns of occurrences (or behavior) without communicating with people involved.
• Conditions: Observable or inferable information, repetitive/frequent/predictable behavior, short duration.
• Advantages: Not subject to biasing factors, some data forms gathered quickly and accurately.
• Disadvantages: public observation or behavior, physical characteristics can be examined, behavior may not be projectable to the future, can be time-consuming and costly if behavior occurs infrequently.

Online Qualitative Research

• Online qualitative research: Primary form of focus groups, comes in two forms (traditional, traditional-aka synchronous groups, online bulletin boards/asynchronous).
• Traditional online: Moderators send questions and provide feedback, participants respond.
• Online bulletin boards (BB): Questions posted for consumers daily, consumers answer within specified timeframes.
• Online forum advantages: Lower cost, faster turnaround, participation from around the world, more openness, easier for busy consumers to participate.
• Online forum disadvantages: Difficult to create group dynamics, nonverbal inputs harder to observe, no client involvement, value of input received is more questionable, moderator skills/experience less directly comparable to in-person.
• Online survey advantages: Rapid deployment, real-time reporting, reduced costs, personalization for greater relevance, high response rates.
• Online survey disadvantages: Difficulty ensuring representative sample, lack of procedures to clarify answers, potential questionnaire programming errors—bandwidth problems.