What Is Good Exploratory Marketing - Research Paper Example

MARKETING RESEARCH ………………………….. College ……………………………… ……………….. Words count: 1649 Introduction Knowledge becomes more ‘powerful’ in the contemporary market place perhaps driven by rapid changes across the business environments. In marketing, knowledge comes from information, which is from data and data comes from marketing research. With radical changes in information technology, consumers get highly exposed to more and more information on which to base their decisions. This is undeniably a very significant reason why marketing research is crucial for organisations if it has to design and develop products and strategies to keep pace with changing business environments. This paper will critically evaluate the theoretical aspects related to exploratory marketing research to find out some marketing information and to cover letter as well as questionnaire in research. Exploratory Research for marketing information In market research, exploratory research is considered as more appropriate when more information is required to analyze a problem, opportunity or market related phenomenon (Wiid and Diggines, 2010, p. 55). Exploratory research helps a marketer acquire more insights and develop understandings rather than collecting accurate and replicable data and this is perhaps the main reason why most exploratory researches involve in-depth interviews. To find out students’ opinion about the purchase of new digital music player or any other kind of trendy products, exploratory research is more appropriate and effective since it helps the marketer clarify ambiguous situations and thus to develop ideas that would be potential for business opportunities (Zikmund and Babin, 2006, p. 51). Exploratory research is normally conducted when the marketer has to develop new products or redesign the existing products by analyzing existing demands, customers’ feedbacks and reviews for the existing products or competitive products etc. Information Required From the marketing perspective, digital music player companies such as Apple Inc, Sony etc that want to identify some most significant variables that their customers use to decide on whether to buy their music players. The company may want to collect variables related to different segments of the market such as students, middle-aged, women etc. For the exploratory research to find out students’ opinion about digital music player, the company would require gathering information related to factors that either directly or indirectly affects customers’ decision making to buy digital music players. For exploratory research to find out students’ opinion about digital players, the researcher needs to collect information such as students’ attitudes towards digital music players, factors affecting their buying behaviour, value propositions they expect from using digital players and their satisfactory levels for buying and using digital players. What they feel about various features and configurations involved in the products are also required. Questions that might be used in this research 1- Do you plan to buy a digital music player in near future? If your answer is Yes, please indicate the brand name of the digital player you may prefer. 2- How many of your classmates in the school/college own a digital music player? What specific brands they are using? 3- Did they suggest you any specific brand for music player? If your answer is Yes, specify the brand. 4- What factor, you think, that has prompted you to buy a digital music player? 5- What specific features and functions you would expect to find in your digital music player? 6- What will be your average spending for buying such a music player? 7- How many hours a day, you think, you can use digital music players to watch songs or other contents? After some basic introductory questions such as name, age, place, gender etc to understand about the respondents, the above mentioned questions will be given in the same order as outlined above. Types of Questions in Marketing Research Marketing researchers may follow different types of questions so as to help respondents conveniently answer the questions. While designing the questions, one basic requirement is that the researcher should ask himself whether the respondents will be able to answer each question asked (Mooi and Sarstedt, 2011, p. 57). Almost all forms of surveys in research require questionnaire that can be distributed to respondents to collect their answers. Data are collected through their answers. While designing and developing questionnaires, researchers should normally make sure that all respondents will be asked same series of questions. Questionnaires include basically three types, open-ended, closed-ended and scaled. An open ended questionnaire encourages an answer phrased in respondent’s own words. Questions that permit the respondents to respond in their own wordings are open-ended, as they have to answer in their own words. Closed ended questionnaire, in contrast, doesn’t allow respondents answer in their own words, but rather, it asks them to select from a limited list of responses. A scaled-response question is a closed-ended question designed to measure the intensity of a respondent’s answer (Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, 2008, p. 249). For a study to determine the important of brand names and features of mobile phone handset, a closed-ended questionnaire will be used. It is because; closed-ended questionnaire will be more convenient for all different types of customers/respondents. Closed-ended questionnaire allows for easy and speedy responses. For researching about brand names and features of mobile handsets, coding and analyzing of data must be easier. This is another reason why closed-ended questionnaire is chosen for this research. In closed-ended questionnaire, data can be easily coded, entered and analyzed. Models of Questions Following are some of the sample questions that might be included in the closed-ended questionnaire for gathering data about brands names and features of mobile phone handsets. 1- Do you own a smartphone? ⃝ Yes ⃝ No 2- Which of the following brands you are familiar with or you presently use? ⃝ Apple ⃝ Samsung ⃝ Nokia ⃝ Blackberry ⃝ Others 3- Which of the following OSs you are familiar with, or you are interested in ⃝ Apple iOS ⃝ Android ⃝ Symbian ⃝ Others 4- What features in your smartphone is more interesting to you? ⃝ Touch screen ⃝ 3G network connection ⃝ Speed ⃝ Clarity ⃝ Camera ⃝ Others 5-If you would like to buy a new smartphone, would you like to switch to another brand? ⃝ Yes ⃝ No 6- If your answer is Yes to the question No 5, which brand you may prefer? ⃝ Apple ⃝ Samsung ⃝ Nokia ⃝ Blackberry ⃝ Others Respondents have to select only the appropriate answers for the above mentioned questions. After the basic questions related to name, age, gender etc, the above mentioned questions will be asked in the same sequences as outlined above, because, it is designed in a way to get details from customers about features they are interested in using mobile phones. Cover Letters A cover letter that accompanies a questionnaire is an important requirement for inducing a reader to complete and return the questionnaire (Bradley, 2013, p. 503). Today, most surveys and researches are conducted online, and therefore it is very important that readers must be encouraged to respond to the questions. Due to that people tend to spend no time for surveys online, it is a critical challenge for the researcher to attract readers towards answering the questions. It must be a kind of sales pitch. In order to encourage people to spend few minutes to answer such questions, marketing researcher must use some strategic ideas to catch their attention and to design the questions as precise as possible so that they shouldn’t feel disturbed. It is important to strategize wordings in cover letters. It should explain why the research is important. It should comprise of some appeals like ‘will you do us a favor’ or ‘your answers are important to us’ etc (Zikmund and Babin, 2006, p. 221).. In online questionnaires, cover letters with wordings such as ‘you are an important visitor to us’, ‘your time will help us’ etc will be helpful to create a positive zeal among the readers to encourage them to answers the questions. Good and bad cover letters Good cover letters will attract readers and influence them to answer the questions. Good cover letters will be helpful to create a positive attitude in readers’ mind towards genuinely answering the questions. Bad cover letter may also influence people to respond, but often, the answers may not be right. If cover letters couldn’t give clear purpose of the study, respondents may answer the questions without due care. Critical Issues in presenting a questionnaire Questionnaire is one of the most significant and powerful research tools used in marketing research. Questionnaire permits wide coverage with relatively minimum money, time and efforts, and it reaches to those people who are difficult to directly contact. It permits more thought-about answers and greater uniformity on how the questions are presented (Beri, 2013, p. 126). However, there are some issues in presenting a questionnaire. While presenting, one major issue is that some respondents may not be equally interesting in the subject matter and therefore they will be more likely to skip some questions. If the researcher forgot to ask a question, it may not be possible to go back to respondents. Often, some questions in the questionnaire appear to be impersonal. In some surveys, it is found that some questions in the questionnaire are incorrectly answered. It is critical challenge for the designer to design the questions in a way that respondents answer ‘right’. If poor language and ambiguous questions are included, respondents may misunderstand the meanings and they may answer ‘wrong’. One big challenge is that, questionnaire may not be an appropriate method for some kind of people such as visually impaired. Conclusion This paper has briefly illustrated about exploratory marketing research and the way it helps clarify ambiguous situations and to develop ideas that would be potential for business opportunities. For this research, information such as consumer satisfaction, their reviews, opinions etc are required. A good and strategically designed cover letter is an important requirement for a questionnaire in order to catch readers’ attention. This paper has outlined critical issues associated with presenting a questionnaire. References Beri, G.C., 2013, Marketing Research, Tata McGraw-Hill Education Bradley, N, 2013, Marketing Research: Tools and Techniques, Oxford University Press Lamb, C, Hair, J and McDaniel, C., 2008, Essentials of Marketing, Sixth edition, Cengage Learning Mooi, E and Sarstedt, M., 2011, A Concise Guide to Market Research: The Process, Data, and Methods Using IBM SPSS Statistics, Springer Science & Business Media Wiid, J & Diggines, C, 2010, Marketing Research, Juta and Company Ltd Zikmund, W. G & Babin, B.J, 2006, Exploring Marketing Research, Cengage Learning, Read More