Marketing Research - BUS2600, Professor Freeman Wu PDF

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BUS2600, Professor Freeman Wu...

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Why do companies need information about consumers (why is market research and information important)?  How to segment/target  How to focus advertising  You learn from mistakes (Red Lobster, all-you-can-eat crab) Good marketing information enables marketers to…  Gain competitive advantage  Reduce financial and image risk (Red Lobster)  Determine consumer attitudes  Monitor the environment  Gather competitive intelligence  Coordinate strategy  Measure performance  Improve advertising credibility  Gain management support for decisions  Verify intuition  Improve effectiveness  Prepare SWOT  Be prepared  Maximize performance [understand consumer needs in order to create value for the customer] Need for information  Managers need information about the environment (but there is so much information out there) Marketing research process 1. Define the problem and research objectives  **most important step of the marketing research process  What do we want to know?  Ex. Coca Cola's big mistake  In the 1980s, losing market share to Pepsi; did blind taste tests and determined that people liked Pepsi better; switched formula but flop; re-implemented original  Coke thought they had a "taste problem" but maybe there was a deeper problem (need to reinvigorate the brand)  Set research objectives  Exploratory research  Purpose: gain background info/better understanding of situation; define research problems; generate hypothesis  Data: small samples; qualitative analysis (ex. interviews, focus groups, videos)  Ex. Nissan  Descriptive research  Purpose: to describe characteristics of group; to estimate proportion of people who behave a certain way; to make specific predictions or generalizations about the target market  Data: typically uses large samples; quantitative analysis/numbers (ex. customer satisfaction survey)

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Causal research Purpose: to test cause and effect relationships (condition x causes outcome y)  Tested through experiments (include independent and dependent variables)  Goal: to determine how changes in x cause changes in y  Must contain a control group (ex. people who are not hungry, a tip jar that has not been salted/already filled) 2. Develop the research plan and collect information  Marketing research data includes primary and secondary data  Primary data--new data collected specifically for the problem at hand  Main types: observational research, focus groups, ethnographic research, data mining, survey research, experimental research, quasiexperiments (i.e. test market; Campbell soup)  Observational research--involves gathering primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations (qualitative or quantitative)  Ex. how long does it take people to choose laundry detergent (answer: 4 seconds, branding/images do not matter as much)  Ex. P&G hair and body wash combo  Ex. Kimberly-Clark easy-open aby wash (pump)  Advantages: objective, accurate  Disadvantages: cannot observe (underlying psychological variables, ex. motivation; you know the what but not the why), don't have access to past behaviors  Focus groups--groups of respondents discuss a marketing problem by responding and reacting to each other  Famous products that "failed" focus groups [**purpose of exploratory research (e.g. focus groups) is to clarify research problems and not to provide solutions; be careful not to make misleading generalizations using sample sizes too small to be representative of the wider population]  Data mining  Quantitative in nature  Use of analytic technologies to quickly explore mountains of data to obtain useful info  Ex. Facebook ads  Survey research--most widely used method and is **best for descriptive research  Flexible (i.e. by mail, online, in person)  Fast and cost effective  But people know that the are part of a study (may lie/give misleading answers; socially-desirable responding)  Advantages: useful for measuring unobservable concepts (attitudes, knowledge, intentions, brand awareness, satisfaction, motivation, etc.) 

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Disadvantages: subject to socially-desirable responding, can measure correlation but not causation, question design can be poor (**important that questions are not leading, ambiguous, unanswerable, two questions in one, non-exhaustive, or have nonmutually exclusive answers)  Secondary data--existing data not collected for the problem at hand, but for some other purpose; collected before or in place of primary data  Sources of secondary data: internal and external (specifics on slides)  Ex. Google Trends  Advantages: cost, speed, could not get data otherwise  Disadvantages: relevance, current, accuracy, impartial [**general rule of thumb: use secondary data first, then turn to primary data only if needed] 3. Implement the research plan--collecting and analyzing the data 4. Interpreting and reporting the findings...