Conducting Marketing Research

1. Marketing Management
4
Conducting
Marketing Research

2. 4-2
Marketing Research Defined
Systematic design, collection,
analysis, and reporting of data
and findings relevant to a specific
marketing situation facing a company.

3. 4-3
The Marketing Research Process
• Define the problem
• Develop the research plan
• Collect information
• Analyze information
• Present findings
• Make decision

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Step 1
• Define the problem
• Specify decision alternatives
• State research objectives

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Three types of objectives
• Exploratory research
▫ Research to gather preliminary information that will
help define problems and suggest hypothesis
• Descriptive
▫ To better describe marketing problems, situations, or
markets such as market potential for a product or the
demographics and attitudes of consumers
• Causal research
▫ To test hypotheses about cause-effect relationship

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Step 2
• Data sources
▫ Primary
▫ Secondary
• Research approach
• Research instruments
• Sampling plan
• Contact methods

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Research Approaches
• Observation
• Focus group
• Survey
• Experimentation

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Research Instruments
• Questionnaires
• Qualitative measures
• Mechanical devices

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Question Types—Dichotomous
In arranging this trip, did you contact Air India?
 Yes  No

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Question Types—Multiple Choice
With whom are you traveling on this trip?
 No one
 Spouse
 Spouse and children
 Children only
 Business associates/friends/relatives
 An organized tour group

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Question Types—Likert Scale
Indicate your level of agreement with the following
statement: Small airlines generally give better
service than large ones.
 Strongly disagree
 Disagree
 Neither agree nor disagree
 Agree
 Strongly agree

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Question Types—Semantic Differential
Air India
Large ………………………………...…………….Small
Experienced………………….………….Inexperienced
Modern………………………..………….Old-fashioned

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Question Types—Importance Scale
Airline food service is _____ to me.
 Extremely important
 Very important
 Somewhat important
 Not very important
 Not at all important

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Question Types—Rating Scale
Air India’s food service is _____.
 Excellent
 Very good
 Good
 Fair
 Poor

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Question Types—Intention to Buy Scale
How likely are you to purchase tickets of Air India if
in-flight Internet access were available?
 Definitely buy
 Probably buy
 Not sure
 Probably not buy
 Definitely not buy

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Question Types—Completely
Unstructured
What is your opinion of Air India?

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Question Types—Word Association
What is the first word that comes to your mind
when you hear the following?
Airline ________________________
Air India _____________________
Travel ________________________

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Question Types—Sentence Completion
When I choose an airline, the most important
consideration in my decision is
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
___________________________________.

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Question Types—Story Completion
“I flew Air India a few days ago. I noticed that the
exterior and interior of the plane had very bright
colors. This aroused in me the following thoughts
and feelings.” Now complete the story.
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
___________________________________

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Question Types—Picture (Empty
Balloons)

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Qualitative Measures
• Shadowing
▫ observing people using products, shopping, going to-
hospitals, taking the train, using their cell phones
• Behavior mapping
▫ photographing people, such as a hospital waiting
room, over two or three days
• Consumer journey
▫ keeping track of all the interactions a consumer has
with a product, service, or space

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Qualitative Measures
• Camera journals
▫ asking consumers to keep visual diaries of their
activities and impressions relating to a product
• Extreme user interviews
▫ talking to people who really know — or know nothing
about a product or service and evaluating their
experience using it.
• Storytelling
▫ prompting people to tell personal stories about their
consumer experiences.
• Unfocused groups
▫ Interviewing a diverse group of people e.g. an artist, a
bodybuilder, a podiatrist

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Sampling Plan
• Sampling unit: Who is to be surveyed?
• Sample size: How many people should be
surveyed?
• Sampling procedure: How should the respondents
be chosen?

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Types of Samples
Probability Nonprobability
• Simple random • Convenience
• Stratified • Judgment
random • Quota
• Cluster

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Contact Methods
• Mail questionnaire
• Telephone interview
• Personal interview
• Online interview

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The Measures of Market Demand
• Potential market (interested consumers who have
sufficient level of interest)
• Available market (interested consumers having
sufficient income and access to the product (qualified
available market)
• Target market (part of qualified available market the
company decides to pursue)
• Penetrated market (set of consumers who are buying
the product)

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Estimating Future Demand
• Survey of buyers’ intentions
• Composite of sales force opinions
• Expert opinion
• Past-sales analysis
• Market-test method

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Analysis
• Most data are initially qualitative: they must be
quantified to permit statistical analysis.
• Quantitative analysis involves the techniques by
which researchers convert data to a numerical form
and subject it to statistical analyses.

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Quantification of Data
• Some data, such as age and income, are intrinsically
numerical.
• Often, quantification involves coding into categories that
are then given numerical representations.
• Researchers may use existing coding schemes (e.g., Census
occupation) or develop their own coding categories. In
either case, the coding scheme must be appropriate to the
nature and objectives of the study.
• A codebook is the document that describes the
identifiers assigned to different variables and the codes
assigned to represent the attributes of those variables.

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Quantitative Analysis
• Univariate - describe a case in terms of a single
variable.
• Subgroup comparisons – describe the
similarities and differences between/among
groups.
• Bivariate - describe a case in terms of two
variables simultaneously.
• Multivariate - analysis of two or more variables
simultaneously.

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Univariate Analysis
• Univariate analysis is the analysis of a single variable.
Because univariate analysis does not involve the
relationships between two or more variables, its purpose
is descriptive than exploratory.
• Several techniques allow researchers to summarize their
original data to make them more manageable while
maintaining as much of the original detail as possible.
Frequency distributions, averages, grouped data,
are all ways of summarizing data concerning a single
variable.

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Average (Central Tendency)
• Mean: result of diving the sum of the values by
the total number of cases.
• Median: middle attribute in the ranked
distribution of observed attributes.
• Mode: the most frequently occurring attribute.

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Dispersion Refers to the way values are distributed
around some central value.
• Standard Deviation: the most commonly used measure of
dispersion.
• A higher standard deviation means that the data are
more dispersed; a lower standard deviation means that
they are more bunched together.
Subgroup Comparisons can be used to describe
similarities and differences among subgroups with
respect to some variables

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• Bivariate analysis focuses on relationships
between variables rather than comparisons of groups.
Bivariate analysis explores the statistical association
between the independent variable and dependent
variable. Its purpose is usually explanatory rather than
merely descriptive.
• Multivariate analysis is a method of analyzing the
simultaneous relationships among several variables. It
may also be used to understand the relationship between
two variables more fully

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Multivariate Analysis Methods
• Two general types of MVA technique
▫ Analysis of dependence
 Where one (or more) variables are dependent
variables, to be explained or predicted by others
 E.g. Multiple regression
▫ Analysis of interdependence
 No variables thought of as “dependent”
 Look at the relationships among variables, objects or
cases
 E.g. cluster analysis, factor analysis

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Application Examples
• Is one product better than the other?
• Which factor is the most important to determine
the performance of a system?
• What are the relationships between variables?

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Major Uses of Multivariate Analysis
• Data reduction or structural simplification
• Sorting and grouping
• Investigation of the dependence among variables
• Prediction
• Hypothesis construction and testing

38. Thank you