MR - Marketing Research [OVERVIEW]

Marketing Research

Introduction

American Marketing Association logo."Marketing research links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information." – American Marketing Association
Businesses use marketing research to identify potential customers, understand current customers, develop strategies like how to price a service, or how to distribute a product, solving problems like sales falling, and to identify opportunities. When businesses launch new ideas like Coca-Cola C2, which was a half calorie and carb soda, plenty of research had to go into the product. Coca-Cola is constantly researching the market to identify opportunities where they can develop new products. Men age 20-40 years old didn't have a low calorie Coke product they could drink because Diet Coke had such a feminine image. C2 was a failure because men were looking for something with no calories and all the taste. It was these findings that led Coke to develop the successful Coke Zero which is a no-calorie, full flavor project. Coca-Cola had done their research but the data was skewed by the wrong questions or someone not looking at the data objectively. Marketing research is important to business; doing it correctly is even more important.

Essential Questions

  1. What is the need for marketing information?
  2. What is the nature and scope of marketing information?
  3. What are the different types of marketing research?
  4. What are the differences between quantitative and qualitative data?
  5. What is the nature of marketing research?
  6. What are the differences in primary and secondary data?
  7. What methods are used to collect data?
  8. What data is monitored for marketing decision making?
  9. How are population, sample, bias, error, validity, and reliability used in marketing?
  10. What are the trends and limitations in marketing research?

Key Terms

  • Marketing Research - Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of data about issues relating to marketing products and services.
  • Marketing Information System - A set of procedures and methods for the regular, planned collection, analysis, and presentation of information for use in making management decisions.
  • Observation Method - A method of data collection in which the situation of interest is watched and the relevant facts, actions, or behaviors recorded.
  • Primary Data - The information collected specifically for the purpose of the investigation at hand.
  • Quantitative Research - research that uses numerical analysis. In essence, this approach reduces the data into numbers.
  • Qualitative Research - Data-gathering techniques that are focused on the significance of observations made in a study rather than the raw numbers themselves
  • Reliability - Determines how consistently an instrument yields similar results under varying conditions. If a measure has high reliability, it yields consistent results.
  • Secondary Data - The statistics not gathered for the immediate study at hand but for some other purpose.
  • Validity - The degree to which the instrument measures what it's supposed to measure.
  • Focus Group - A personal interview conducted among a small number of individuals simultaneously the interview relies more on group discussion than on a series of directed questions to generate data. It is also called group in-depth interview.

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