- What advantages does marketing research offer to the decision-maker over “gut-feeling” decision-making?”
Answer- Market research can provide a client with accurate facts to go along with their marketing strategy rather than just going with your gut feeling. Often at times, you can find that what you think are making money off, you aren’t and without this research, you could spend all your time marketing the wrong product. When you go off your gut feeling, you may be missing a clear easy response and you’ll end up on a tangent.
Some clear benefits of market research are;
– You are able to identify your opportunities in your marketplace.
– You are able to measure yourself against your competitors. Meaning you are able to see a clear line of how well you stack up against your competition.
– You may be able to find trends in the market. For example, more candy is bought at the end of October, why? Halloween.
– It will help you maximise your returns.
In terms of just going off your gut, you won’t minimise the risk. You’ll be taking a huge gamble on what your customers want.
- “Under what circumstance(s) is a company most likely to conduct secondary research?”
Ans- If a company is seeking secondary data, they are most likely seeking data that has been collected before by other companies/ governments or organisations. This data, however, cannot be taken as true source, as data changes so frequently it is rare that the source is accurate.
Small businesses may also use secondary data as it is cheaper than doing their own primary research. Looking into research that has already been conducted is a lot cheaper and therefore allows smaller businesses to do this much-needed research to help their businesses.
- What type of qualitative research would you suggest in the following situations?
- A product manager suggests development of a new interactive game for the Apple Watch
- A movie producer is interested in the future of cinema attendance versus downloaded movies
- An advertiser wishes to identify the symbolism associated with using a power tool
- “Describe the sampling procedure to select consumers of Coca Cola No Sugar at UNIVERSITY (all Australian universities) and find out why they prefer Coca Cola No Sugar over other soft drinks.”
Consider:
- Which sampling method will be used and why?
- How will the respondents be selected?
- Where will the respondents be found?
- What time of day will the people be approached?
- How will the people be approached (are there any ethical considerations?)
- “We all know that cameras are used in supermarkets for security purposes. Can they be used for observing consumers’ shopping behaviour? What type of behaviour can be observed using these cameras in supermarkets?”
- “Why is a response bias a concern for survey researchers? Are there any other issues that should be of greater concern?”
- “Define pretesting. Pretests cost time and money. How might a researcher decide if pretesting is necessary?”
- “What is the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics?”
- “How does correlation differ from bivariate regression?”
- “What is the aim of cluster analysis? Multidimensional scaling?”
Ans- Cluster Analysis refers to a body of techniques used to identify objects or individuals that are similar with respect to one criterion or several criteria where multi-dimensional scaling provides a means for measuring object in a multi-dimensional space on the basics of measures of the similarity of objects.
An example of Cluster analysis would be on the housing marketing demonstrating the relationship between house value, size, neighbourhood features, average pollution and age of houses within the same neighbourhood.
An example of Multi-dimensional scaling is a drink company launching a new product, testing in dimensions like Features of drink, Initial Taste thoughts, After taste thoughts, comparing against other brands with a similar product.
