Questions about Marketing - Research Paper Example

MARKETING RESEARCH 200 Individual Assignment Cover Sheet Assignment Question Marks 1. In what ways can marketing research influence the development and implementation of marketing strategy? Does that mean that organizations that conduct market research will perform better than organisations that does not? Please provide adequate references and examples for each of the points in your discussion. (Recommended approx. 1000 –1200 words) 100 marks 2. Discuss the following statement: “Quantitative research is more important than qualitative research because it results in statistical information and conclusive findings.” Use references to support your opinions. (Recommended approx. 1000 –1200 words) 100 marks Total Marks (200 marks) 1. In what ways can marketing research influence the development and implementation of marketing strategy? Does that mean that organizations that conduct market research will perform better than organisations that does not? Please provide adequate references and examples for each of the points in your discussion. Marketing plays a vital role in the development of an organisation. It is a necessary part of every business and no business can sustain in the market without proper marketing strategies and techniques. When we look deep into the oceans of marketing, we observe many things that are pre-requisites and are required necessarily to perform proper marketing. Market Research is one of them. What is Marketing Research? Marketing research is basically a simple function, which interlinks consumers, public and customers to the marketer through the flow of information. It helps to get the idea of what a layman thinks about the product and in which manner a marketer should market the products. Marketing research specifies the information required to solve an issue, manages and implements the data collection process, analyses results, and communicates the findings and their implications. (Journal of Marketing Research 2011) It is basically about understanding consumer behaviour, like how a particular person quenches his thirst while he is at work. It helps you to get an idea of the consumers’ mentality. It also helps in ascertaining the current position of the company in the eyes of a consumer. A company can never improve its products unless it is aware of its current product standings. Therefore, market research creates an opportunity by conducting in-depth research and helps organizations to progress on regular basis. Moreover, a thorough marketing research can also help in getting answers of the following questions, by remaining unbiased. Who will buy your product? Will the consumers of your product recommend your product to others? What do customers expect from you? Are you meeting their standards? Are you competitors better or do you have the best standing amongst the customers? There are many similar questions that need to be answered in order to improve the performances of businesses among competitors (Alberta 2003). In addition, market research is the best way to get first hand information of customers. By conducting these researches, not only you are getting relevant information but also showing your customers that how much you care about them. It is also an admitted fact that these marketing researches helps strengthen customer relationships (American Marketing Research 2011). In addition, no one can deny the fact that a fine line separates the success or failure in business and marketing research is correlated to the success or failure of an organization. Influence of marketing research in the Development and Implementation of Marketing Strategy: Considering the conventional definition and concept of marketing research, (what is the conventional definition of MR? mention it) (Mentioned Under the heading of What is Marketing Research, with reference to the JMR) one can easily deduce that marketing research certainly influence the development and implementation of a marketing strategy. A thorough market research can help in finding out the expected and unexpected consequences which one could face during the business tenure. A market research through internet is a cost-effective way which provides an edge in the development and implementation of Marketing Strategy (IJMR 2009). Therefore, to curtail business risk and to make marketing strategy more effective, marketing research is a very useful tool. An example below perfectly illustrates the influence of market research on the development and implementation of marketing strategy: For example, you are (don’t you use. Replace it with an organization) (You can use anything here, depends on what seems better to you and your teacher) willing to make an ecommerce website to start your virtual business. In this regard, if you spend some money in conducting a basic research about how people make ecommerce websites, what ingredients are required to make a perfect website and How to market your websites, it will certainly help you to save precious time and eliminate risks. It will inform you about the mistakes you could have committed without conducting market research and will certainly help you in making your marketing strategy more powerful. Thus, in this way, a market research can influence the development and implementation of your marketing strategy. Another great example to be taken into consideration would be YouTube. YouTube and its’ team members conducted flawless and countless marketing research to position themselves as global leaders. Therefore, this allows them to devise a perfect marketing strategy, which in result helped YouTube (The first video sharing website ever launched on internet) to supersede yahoo.com and enjoy the overall 3rd rank in the list of all websites. Does that mean that organisations that conduct market research will perform better than organisations that does not? From the aforementioned facts and figures, it can easily be deduced that organisations that conduct marketing research perform better than organisations that does not. ( Again, you need to back this up from somebody or somewhere, probably your textbook. Im quite sure they have something related to this) (Basically, it’s a deduction for the aforementioned facts and references) Market research helps you to provide a clear picture on vast canvas about the strengths and weaknesses. It helps you to get a clear view on consumer insights. According to Carlo Mari, the study of consumer behaviour helps you to get the perception of the market. You can directly get the criticisms about your product or services from the public and this will help you to perform better than other organisations which do not conduct such researches. (Carlo Mari 2008). It is observed that consumers buy product on the basis of three things and that are 1) The attributes of a product 2) The functional benefits and emotional consequences derived from those attributes 3) The personal values that those consequences reinforce (ARF 2007) In a nutshell, people choose products on the basis of emotional benefits and cognitive preferences. A perfect example is illustrated below to show the relation of choice of customers with the aforementioned things: For example, if a person is buying X hand wash, which is guarantying him 98% protection against germs and lessens the chances of his family from being ill, then the person for the security of his family will certainly buy the same hand wash. In this way a person chooses the product on the basis of emotional benefits and cognitive preferences. Thus, such marketing research regarding consumer behaviour will help organisations to perform better. It is a fact that no organisation can perform well, unless the organisation has conducted a market research (Mari Carlo 2008). These researches are the backbone of your marketing strategy and helps in yielding better results. In addition, there are many other examples which clearly illustrates that marketing research is an integral part, required to build an effective marketing strategy. Multi National Companies all over the globe have a strong market research team which helps them to ascertain the fluctuating consumer behaviour periodically. Considering this fact, it is safe to say that marketing research is indeed a necessity and organisations conducting market research are performing far better than organisations that do not conduct such research. 2. Discuss the following statement: “Quantitative research is more important than qualitative research because it results in statistical information and conclusive findings.” Use references to support your opinions. A basic decision to take before starting any research exercise is to decide whether to go for a quantitative research or qualitative research. In a lay man terms, quantitative research is the method employed for measuring anything whereas qualitative research deals with the description and in depth analysis of a particular subject. Therefore, it can be easily inferred that quantitative research methods include numbers, proportions and statistics and qualitative methods include quotes, description and explanations pertaining to different phenomena’s. It has been observed that both of these methodologies have been used simultaneously in the research process (Shields 2003). An important question that arises while a research is being carried out is the scope and dimensions of required research. Quantitative methods usually have an edge over qualitative methods as they involve a huge, random sample (which erases biases) and also take into consideration various dimensions (variables affecting the test environment) (Johnson, B., & Christensen, L. 2008). Another characteristic of quantitative research is its focus on objectivity and identification of important agents, their associations and co-relations e.g. a research survey of sales of a particular product in some region will not only discover the role of certain factors (such as pricing, trends, purchasing power) but will also establish the relational analysis between two factors (like if price increases and purchasing power is kept constant, how will sales be affected). The central idea behind quantitative research is the division of different factors so that they can be measured and modeled according to the rules of statistics and mathematics. These models are generally free from factors (distortion) that might perturb the flow and direction of research. A researcher has a very clear picture of the thing that is to be accounted for; therefore, testing and experiments follow strict controls and regulations. The process is clearly monitored and as the process can be repeated several times, the chances of getting concordant results are very high. On the other hand, qualitative research don’t provide such strict controls and since the researcher is unaware of his goal (which is not pre-determined), there is a very high probability of him going off-track. The nature of qualitative research is such that it will always lead to non-conclusive results and not to precise results which will surely affect the decision making practice. Quantitative tools are meant to remove any bias and their results are always some sort of numbers which can be subjugated to any sort of analysis and findings. There is only one truth which is vigorously proven through different techniques and derivations (Sale, Lohfield, Brazil 2002). On the contrary, qualitative tools are mostly open-ended and their results are specific texts describing one problem area. Qualitative tools fail to recognise general tools and pattern and therefore, they cannot be assigned to whole population for analysis. Being indifferent to emotions, cultures, values and traits is a key aspect of quantitative research coupled with the removal of researched bias. A researcher cannot bring any bias as tested models won’t accommodate any changes. Perversely, researcher bias and information collection bias is very evident in qualitative research. Quantitative research has a special application in product development and marketing research as it’s used for confirming findings and concluding results. For example, customer visits can be conducted which may result in revealing some unmet needs of customers. Then, a larger group of customers can be surveyed with specific inputs on particular aspects of the product. This will help you catch the factor that is the cause of concern. (Qualitative Market Research 2011) In its true sense, quantitative research looks to focus on how people think, act or feel about a particular thing as opposed to why they think, act or feel about the same thing. This sort of research encompasses huge sample sizes often peaking to 100k respondents (example is AC Nielsen’s Survey). This sample can constitute of respondents belonging to different cultures and customs but they are asked same series of questions to maintain consistency and coherency. These research studies often take the form of tightly couple closed-end questionnaires for better statistical analysis (such as tally marking). Some people fence that quantitative methods are victor than qualitative methods because of the very reason that they are free from any sort of preconception. What it really means is the fact that the results are very close to reality. Qualitative methods are full of biases and hence, the obtained results may not depict the original picture. This leverage to include irrelevant observations is highly undesirable in social and mathematical sciences. Another argument that can arise is about the ‘flexibility’ of research (Ratcliff 1995). Qualitative researchers, without doubts tend to be more innovative and flexible but this idea is actually not supported as flexibility often leads to risk and on average, every researcher is risk averse. “Qualitative researchers still largely feel themselves to be second-class citizens whose work typically evokes suspicion, where the ‘gold standard’ is quantitative research.” (Silverman, 2000) An explanation to why quantitative research is termed as gold standard can be the fact that it comprises of five tried and tested methods that include social surveys, controlled experiments, official statistics, structured ethnographies and content analysis. A very good example would be a survey of a product sales and competitors product. The independent variable would be the competitor’s product and the product sales would be a dependent variable relying on the performance of competitor’s product in the same area. The findings of such a study can be put into a table and a graph can also be plotted for dependent variable against the independent one. The researcher can achieve confidence by surveying at least 100 customers of the Wal-Mart store in the proximity and also analyze the correlation if it exists between the factors taken under consideration. Quantitative researchers don’t make causal statements until and unless they have tested all possible hypotheses on every factor. In our example, product sales may not have dependent only on competitor’s performance but also on pricing and advertising of product. One can easily deduce from the above discussion that quantitative research is an appropriate method of finalising results and approving or disapproving an already formulated hypothesis. For this very reason, quantitative methods have been standardised and are widely used in industries and organisations. Analysis and studies of results leads to comprehensive findings which may be published and legally discussed. External and internal diagonals are normally filtered out from the system which establishes the authenticity of results. References Alberta. “Market Research: The Basics.” AG Strategies [2003]: 1-11. ARF, The Research Authority. “Word of Mouth Marketing: Additional Learning from the Journal of Advertising Research.” Principal # 3 [2007]: 12-15 American Marketing Association. “Journal of Marketing Research.” What is Marketing Research [2011] Emerald Journals. “Qualitative Market Research,” An International Journal [2011] Johnson, B. & Christensen, L. “Educational research: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches,” Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications [2008]: 1-34 Mari, Carlo. “Journal of Marketing Education.” Doctoral Education and Transformative Consumer Research [2008]: 3-8 Ratcliff, Donald. “Validity and Reliability in Qualitative Research” For an Extensive Discussion of Qualitative Validity and Reliability [1995]: 20-31 Shields and Twycross, “The difference between quantitative and qualitative research,” Paecliatric Nursing [2003]: 20-24 Sale, Lohfield, Brazil, “Revisiting the Quantitative-Qualitative Debate: Implications for Mixed-Methods Research” Quality and Quantity [2002] Thomas, Nelson & Silverman. Research methods in physical activity. Library of Congress: Human Kinetics, 2007. The Market Research Society. “International Journal of Marketing Research.” Internet Research [2009]: 6-12 Read More