Marketing Information Systems & Marketing Research

Chapter # 4

Marketing Research:

The systematic approach used for collection, analysis, and reporting of data related to a specific marketing situation or problem faced by an organization.

Marketing research is problem oriented and is used to identify the causes and factors related to a specific marketing problem or issue. The main purpose of marketing research is to understand the problem faced by the company and find out solutions to that problem.

For examples when an organization is facing a decline in the sales of a product, it can decide to use a research team to conduct marketing research to define what the main reasons of declining sales are and how it can be controlled and improved.Tapal tea faced the same problem in the major cities of Punjab, as the sales of their product are much lesser in Punjab as compared to cities of Sindh. The company decided to go for market research and identifies that the problem is with the packaging of Tapal tea rather than it taste, quality or price. Consequently, Tapal decided to change its packaging to hard pack to improve their position in Punjab.

Marketing Research Process:

1: Define the problem & Research objectives:Marketing research starts with problem definition, as the primary task of the researcher is to identify understand the problem because a well defined problem is half solved. A well defined problem will also help the researcher to answer the question that why this research is being conducted and what is the expected outcome of this research. This will be relating to the main objectives of research. Research problem and objective are written in clear manner to make the marketing officials understand what is the nature, scope and importance of this research.When a researcher defines a problem, it means that he knows the main problem for research, it background, its nature, its intensity and various factors contributing to the problem. Understanding all these factors will help the researcher to conduct research positively.2: Develop a Research Plan:A research plan describes the design of the research. How it will be conducted, where data will be collected from, what methods and tool will be used to collect data, who will be the respondent, how many respondents will be used for research etc.A good research plan includes decision over the following issues:

a. Research Sources: Primary Data & Secondary Data

b. Research Approaches (Methods): Observation, Survey and Experiment

c. Contact method: Personal, mail, telephone, online

d. Sampling plan: sampling unit, sampling size, sampling procedure.

e. Research instrument: Questionnaire, Electronic instruments.

a. Research Sources: These are categorized into two types; Secondary sources of data and primary sources of data.Secondary sources: (Secondary data collection)Comprise of already collected and organized data available in published or electronic form like books, research report, web sites, search engines and online databases etc.Primary sources: (Primary data collection)Marketer may face an issue for which secondary data may not be available or the available data is out dated. Here researchers use primary data collection source, which is collecting data directly from the people (respondent) involved or related to a specific problems. E.g. a company may collect information related to a product from the consumer or retailer, depending on the problem at hand.b. Research Approaches: Observation, survey and experimentObservational Research: Collection of information by observing relevant people, actions and situations and recording facts requires for research. A researcher may observe consumers during shopping in a store to identify what are they buying, how they are buying, how they are paying etc. Survey Research:Collection of information by asking people questions related to the research issue. Many researcher use personal interviews and meetings to collect information directly from respondents or people related to research problem. This method is used when detail information is required about a research problem.Experiment:A method of data collection in which the researcher can select different group of respondents and collect data more than once after changing the conditions or factors related to research. This allows the research to experiment with many group of respondent, change the setting under which research is conducted and analyze the variations. c. Contact Methods:A researcher can use a variety of contact methods depending on the nature of research problem and availability of respondents such as Telephone, mail, face to face meeting and emails. E.g. if the respondents are not easily reachable or living in various cities, then the researcher can use telephone or mail to contact them and save time and money.d. Sampling Plan:A sample is a small group of respondent selected out of the large population with characteristics to represent the whole population. Sampling plan includes the following decisions; Sampling unit means who will be survey e.g. users of a product, retailers etc. Sampling size refers to how many respondents will be surveyed. This decision is based on the total population, the larger the total population the larger the sample size. A sample size of 50 is ideal for a population of 1000 people. Sampling procedure refers to which sampling technique will be used to select a sample. There are various sampling techniques, such as Probability sampling where each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected and Non-probability sampling is where each member of population does not have an equal chance of being selected, i.e. the researcher can select people on his convenience. e. Research Instrument:Questionnaire: Most commonly used instrument or tool for research is questionnaire. A questionnaire is a set of questions designed to draw out information from respondent related to a research problem. A questionnaire can be used in person, via telephone or mail. It may consist of open ended questions, asking for detail view of respondent and close-ended questions asking a short and specific response like yes or no. 3. Implement the research plan: (Data collection & Data Analysis) Once the research plan is finalized the researcher implements the plan by actually collecting data by following the decision in the plan. Data collection is time consuming activity and requires time and experience. Once the data is collected, it is analyzed, tabulated, organized and brought into proper format to develop conclusions and identify the findings.4. Presentation of Data: (Reporting of facts)In this step of marketing research process the researcher prepares a research report and presents the key findings/conclusions relating to the problem and recommendations/suggestions to solve the problem. The research report is formal document that describes in detail the major objectives for conducting the research and entails all issues related to the problem and its possible solutions. Define the problem&Research objectives

Develop a Research Plan for data collection

Implementation of research plan Data Collection & Data Analysis

Presentation of Data

(Research Report)