Introduction to Marketing Research: Part 1
Slide1
Hi! My name is Mike Hyman, and I’m a Professor at New Mexico State University in the Marketing Department. This is “Introduction to Marketing 310—Marketing Research.” This entire course, from a lecture perspective, will be online and available to you whenever you wish. All the lectures will be through this PowerPoint format, with my audio clips attached to most of the slides. The lectures (at least as far as the audio portion) will be as if I delivered them in class. The point of this audio is to make the lectures available to you and not make them too terribly stilted. If I worked to perfect every single audio clip so that it is flawless, you won’t enjoy listening to them. These are going to be real lectures in real time, but available to you any time.
Slide 2
This series of online lectures is based on the in-class lectures I’ve delivered during the last twenty-five years about Marketing Research. In delivering those lectures, I’ve borrowed liberally from many other sources; certainly many textbooks I’ve used over the last twenty-five years, the works of cartoonists, and the works of other marketing researchers. In other words, this course is heavily borrowed from many other sources. So while it is perfectly acceptable to use this for pedagogical purposes--you are welcome to review these materials as frequently as you like--it would be inappropriate to borrow any of these other materials for any other purpose. Therefore, I am asking you not to do so.
Slide 3
One obvious advantage of this online format is that it is asynchronous. You may listen to any or all of the lecture at your convenience. The downside seemingly would be that it is not especially interactive. Unlike an in-class lecture, you might believe that you won’t be able to ask any questions; but that really isn’t the case. Each PowerPoint presentation has numbered slides. All you need to do is email me at , indicate which presentation and which slide number is causing you some confusion, and I will quickly respond to that email. This type of feedback will be especially useful, not just to you, but to me as well. I’ll revisit that particular slide and audio clip, try to understand why my explanation or the slide itself may have appeared confusing, modify one, the other, or both, and then post the revised version on the internet. Over time, I’m hoping that any confusion will be permanently resolved through your questions to me about possibly confusing explanations or slides. In other words, I am encouraging you to email me regarding any questions you have about any of these presentations.
Slide 4
So Let’s Begin (No Audio)
Slide 5
I’m sure you’ll come to agree that marketing research humor is rather limited at best. Nonetheless, I often try to illustrate points through the use of cartoons. One of the points I’d like to make right off is there are certain reasons for taking this class other than it is required for marketing majors. One of the main reasons for taking this class is so that you will be an informed consumer of marketing research.
This cartoon illustrates that lots of problems can occur when you have no idea what you are buying. In this case, Calvin is so clueless about mathematics that he doesn’t realize that three hundred billion gazillion is not the sum of 7+6. My goal in making you an informed consumer of marketing research is to help you avoid this type of situation.
Slide 6
The point of this cartoon is to illustrate one very critical point about marketing research. That is, marketing research cannot replace managerial decision making in the same way that a computer cannot write Calvin’s book report for him. A marketing research study cannot make a decision for you. The results of a marketing research study are one of many inputs toa decision. With any luck and after this course, you’ll know exactly to what extent you should trust different kinds of research and whichtype of studyyou should use to makedifferent marketing-related decisions.
Slide 7
One of the things that marketing managers do is to assist marketing researchers in their research. Marketing managers provide researchers with sufficient background and feedback regarding studies so that, once a study is fielded, the results that follow from it will be valid and helpful to the marketing decision maker.
Here’s a case where clearly the study that was fielded left much to be desired. Had the study been done properly, there’s no chance that the “None of the Above” restaurant would have been the name for this particular establishment.
Slide 8
In addition to making you an informed consumer of marketing research, my other major goal for this class is to prepare you to conduct, from beginning to end, a customer satisfaction survey. To do that, I’ll need to review many of the dimensions of marketing research: how to identify a research problem, how to develop a series of research questions related to that problem, how to design a survey that will explore those research questions. Ultimately, once you’ve fielded that survey and collected respondent data, you will learn how to take that data, input it into a computer, analyze it, understand it, and write a report that a manager could use to make a sound decision.
So the two goals for this class are to make you an informed consumer of marketing research and to prepare you to perform a customer satisfaction survey for the kinds of organizations that you are likely to work for, which I am assuming would be smaller marketing firms without dedicated marketing research departments. Part of this process entails showing you not only what are appropriate things to do, but also showing you examples of inappropriate things so that you’ll know to avoid them.
This next series of three slides shows you what someone who is totally unknowledgeable about appropriate question development would write for a questionnaire question.
In the first slide, you can see the choices for demographics are absurd, at best.
Slide 9
The next questionnaire, which covers this and the next slide, I show you for two reasons. One reason is that, if you read the questions that are asked, you will see that they are extraordinarily leading questions. It would be almost impossible for anybody to answer these questions in a different way than the question writer had intended. For example, the second question asks, “Despite an international moratorium on commercial whaling, Norway has taken it upon itself to resume killing whales for commercial purposes. Japan continues to kill whales for so-called ‘scientific research.’ Would you support an international initiative to create a whale sanctuary, banning all commercial whaling in the waters around Antarctica?”
You would be hard pressed to answer “no” given the way that particular question has been phrased. If you read the remaining questions in this survey, you will see that all of them are quite leading. It makes no sense to ask a question that is leading because the point of fielding the survey is to understand (in this case) the respondents’ attitudes. There is no understanding of an attitude if the answer is obvious.
Slide 10
The other reason for showing you this particular questionnaire, which I received from a colleague who was interested in identifying the worst questionnaires ever developed, is the last questions at the very bottom (numbered 5 and 6) and then the plea after those questions. “Do you support Greenpeace’s nonviolent direct action to protect all marine animals and preserve ocean ecosystems?” “Would you be willing to spend just a few cents a day to help Greenpeace expose, confront, and stop the decimation of the world’s oceans and marine life?” Not only would there be almost no way to answer “no” to those questions, but clearly this was not meant to be an information gathering survey. This is really a marketing piece. This is an example of what we call “frugging.” This is not an obscenity, but rather stands for fundraising under the guise of research.
Fielding a study like this is ethically problematic. One of the things we will discuss later in the semester in at least one lecture is research ethics. A questionnaire like this one is totally inappropriate. One of my goals for this course is that, if you ever do any marketing research or if you ever purchase any research, then the research you do or purchase will be conducted ethically.
Slide 11
I’m sure you’ve taken enough marketing classes at this point or been a consumer for long enough to recognize that marketing is a very complex subject, and marketing managers have very difficult tasks. The goal of marketing research is to help marketing managers to make better marketing decisions. Sometimes it is those decisions that present most of the complexity in the development of a new product, and the technology to produce the new product is relatively straightforward. That is the point of this particular cartoon.
Slide 12
Unfortunately, there is a lot of misguided conventional wisdom in marketing. Marketing research is often necessary to dispel managers of that erroneous conventional wisdom. As this quote from Ward indicates, “Often times, it’s not the things that we don’t know that get us in trouble, it is the things that we believe that are true, but in fact are not.” One of the values of marketing research is to examine those things that we believe are true, but in fact may not be true about our customers, our competitors, and the environment--all the areas that concern a good marketing manager.
Slide 13
One of my goals for this class is that if you do marketing research, then you’ll do it right the first time. That may mean you doing the research yourself, or it may mean you hiring someone to do the research for you. Either way, it is an expensive proposition if you do a study and then discover that you did it incorrectly and it is worthless in helping you make sound marketing decisions.
Slide 14
Even worse, you may not realize the research you’ve done is inappropriate and, in fact, is misleading. Misleading research is worse than doing no research at all, as is illustrated by this cartoon.
Slide 15
So what is marketing research? These next three slides are based on the current AMA definition of marketing research. They will give you a broad idea of what marketing research entails and the domain of this course. If nothing else, I hope you will note that marketing research is far more than those annoying people who call you during dinner and ask you a series of questions. It is far more than those people at the mall who intercept you with a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other hand, rather than allowing you to shop, and ask you numerous questions about some product you care little about.
Slide 16
This slide indicates the kinds of questions marketing researchcan answer for marketing managers. Specifically, marketing research is intended to link customers, consumers, and the public to markets through information used to identify and define marketing. As you can see on this slide, there is an informational aspect of marketing research. It deals with more than mere consumers. It also deals with buyers, it deals with the public in general, and it’s used to identify and define things for marketing managers. Marketing research is also useful for generating, refining and evaluating marketing actions. Certainly, managers need insights into the kinds of things they ought to be doing; they need insight into the ways they can modify and improve the things they are already doing, and they also need ways to benchmark and to evaluate whether what they are doing could be improved.
Marketing research also is important to help in the monitoring of marketing performance. How is the firm doing in terms of things like market share, sales volumes, and consumer attitudes toward the firm or its products? Finally, marketing research could help managers to really understand marketing as a process, even if it only gives them insights--basic fundamental insights--into how their market works. Those insights could ultimately be turned into better decisions in months, or maybe years, out.
Slide 17 (No Audio)
AMA Definition
MR is the function which links the consumer, customer, and the public to the marketer through information—information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. MR specifies the information required to address these issues; designs the method for collecting information; manages and implements the data collection process; analyzes the results; and communicates the findings and their implications.
Slide 18
Marketing Research versus Marketing Information Systems
So before we go any further, let’s make sure we’re clear the difference between marketing research and marketing information systems.
Slide 19
MIS vs. Marketing Research
Perhaps the easiest way to ensure that you recognize the difference between a Marketing Information System and Marketing Research is to do a simple ‘compare and contrast’.As thisslide shows, marketing research is something we do when we need the answer to an immediate question. Marketing research is inspired by a problem that management suddenly recognizes it’s facing. In contrast, marketing information systems generate marketing information on a routine basis, which could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Such systems generate ongoing reports in a standardized format that managers can use for benchmarking or tracking trends. Marketing research only uses data sources that are relevant to the research problem. So if we are conducting marketing research and we want to understand something about different attitudes among consumers, then we’re looking at a survey. An information system, on the other hand, gathers great quantities of information, and if the system is working well, then it allows its operators to sift that data and sort it in a way that allow the manager to see patterns in that data. So as a result, marketing research deals with much less information than a marketing information system. However, these things complement one another. The information system, in fact, may alert the manager to a problem and that to better understand that problem marketing research is required.
Slide 20
Here’s another table that allows you to contrast the differences between marketing research and marketing information systems. The information here is similar to that summary of the last slide, but perhaps the additional text here will help to explain the differences a bit better.
Slide 21
Finally, this slide indicates the components of marketing information systems. You can see that such systems are comprised of four components. The first component, internal data, is generated from accounting records; things like sales, costs, and inventories. Because this kind of data is organized in accord with accounting needs and not in accord with marketing needs, it may be necessary to convert that data into a form that is more readily useable by a marketing manager. The second component is marketing intelligence,which is comprised of observation and outside data that can come from existing publicationsor companies dedicated to providing such data (such as syndicated data services). We’ll talk more about those sources as the semester progresses. Observation refers to a manager’s observation and interaction with sales force members, distributors, suppliers, or other executives. The third component is theanalytical system. Marketing information systems rely on marketing scientists who create models meant to help managers make better decisions. Finally, there’smarketing research, a component of the overall information system that is triggered by observations or trends revealed by the ongoing data collection process that indicate there may be a problem. I’ll talk, because this course is about marketing research, much more about the quantitative and qualitative aspects of marketing research as the semester progresses.
Slide 22
These next series of slides are meant to emphasize the conditions under which it is advisable to do marketing research and the conditions under which it is ill advised to do marketing research. My goal is to make sure you understand that often it’s best not to conduct research. If you mistakenly do research when it is unnecessary, you’ll come to believe it’s of little value, it’s overpriced, and it’s irrelevant—and that would be the absolutely most wrong conclusion you could draw. There are many circumstances under which doing marketing research is valuable, and understanding when you are faced with a situation that merits research and when you are faced with a situation that does not merit research is critical to applying research properly. As the first slide indicates, “Why would you do marketing research?” You would do it if it would help you to make a better decision. That’s the primary reason for doing research. As I’m sure I’ll mention repeatedly throughout this presentation, the goal of marketing research is primarily to help managers select the best among alternative viable courses of action; in other words, to make the best decisions.