Definition of marketing research and processes

Definition of marketing research and processes The European Society For Opinion and Marketing Research identify market research as the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis, and dissemination of information for improving decision-marketing related to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in marketing.(Malhotra. N and Birks. D 2000) In the book marketing research an integrated approach, Alan Wilson also point out marketing research is about to provide information which should focus on customers, markets and competitors. That information will be used for making marketing decisions. Those information should be collected by wide range of sources and techniques, and then analysis, developed and applied. Marketing research also involves communication and dissemination, which will affect the decision makers and interested parties. Marketing research process There are seven steps in marketing research process: define the research problem, determine the research design, choose the method for collecting primary data, design the sample, collect the data, analyze and interpret the data, prepare the research report. Though those steps, marketers will make conversant decisions or reduce the risk of their decisions. Define the research problem In this step, the target of marketing research should be clarified. Research problem definition involves expressing the general problem and discovering the detail constituent of the general problem. Alan Wilson mentioned six issues must be considered in this step, the market environment, competitors reaction, organizations own plan, the effectiveness of companys previous marketing activities, the nature of new products and customer behavior. Define the research problem has been considered as the most important step in a marketing research project. Research can only be designed and carried out if the research problem has been clarified. Joselyn considered nothing is more important to satisfy customers requests than identify the correct research problem. All the following steps of marketing research process would be wastes if the beginning of the research, define the research problem, is misapprehended. A good metaphor of identify the research problem is compared to doctors give patients medicine and treatment. Illness can only be cured when right medicine has been given, wrong medicine sometimes is even more dangerous than the illness, and the most important thing for a doctor is to identify the illness. That is the same situation as marketing research process. Define the research problem also can be seen as a communication between decision makers and marketing researchers. Researchers offer research supports as the decision makers require. Determine the research design After the problem has been clarified by marketers, to design the research is the next step of the whole research process. A research process is a blueprint for managing a marketing research process. It provides details of information for figuring out the research problem. There are two general research design categories, secondary research and primary research. Secondary research is collecting secondary data which is some information collected before for some other problems, not directly for the current research problem. There are two ways to collect secondary data, internal data and external data. Internal data is information inside organization, which collect from sales report, consumer information. External data is the informations resource from outside company; the resource could from public newspaper or other organizations report. Secondary research is widely used in marketing research process, the main reason of that is secondary data is easily collected and also the low cost of the research process. Malhotra mentioned in his book there also seven advantages that secondary data can help marketers. First it can help marketers to identify the research problem. Second, it can develop an access to the problem. Third, it also helps marketers to create a sampling plan. Fourth, it will explicate a suitable research design. Fifth, research questions can be answered by using secondary data. Sixth, primary data will be interpreted by secondary data with more penetration. Last, it can improve qualitative research results. The disadvantages of secondary research are also very obvious. Too many data have been collect during research; most of them are not even related to the research problem, so it will take marketers a lot of time to select and analysis these data. Primary research is using observation, qualitative or quantitative research to collect primary data. Primary data is defined as a kind of data originated by the researcher specifically to address the research problem. Three methods mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph are quite different from each other. Observation research Observation research collects data without any questions been asked to research targets. Researchers become the witness of targets behavior, such as childrens behavior with a new toy, or TV viewing patterns. The observation research can be divided into several categories, 1, natural versus contrived observation. 2, visible versus hidden observation. 3, Structured versus unstructured observation. 4, mechanized versus human observation. 5, participant versus non-participant. Qualitative research Qualitative research is a less structured research process, which involves small samples of individuals. The purpose of qualitative research is to understand targets, not to measure them. Malhotra considered qualitative research is based on at least two intellectual traditions. One of them is building up ideas and combining methods from psychology. The other is the set of idea and associated methods from sociology and anthropology. Both of these two traditions are related to the development of communication between researchers and those been researched. Researchers chose qualitative research for four reasons. First, in some research, questions are involved privacy or negative feeling that the research target unwilling to give answers to them. Qualitative research question are not full structured questionnaires, by giving these kind of questions can avoid the issues that people dont want to be asked. Second, subconscious feelings have huge affect on responders answers. Such as emotion , motivation or ego, these could always drive the thoughts, when responders try to answer the questions. Third, complex phenomena. With full structured questions, respondents sometimes have difficulties to find out the main propose of those questions, or they could just describe the situations but can explain the reasons to them. Last reason to use qualitative research is the holistic dimension. For example, a restaurant is doing a research about the satisfaction when customers having meal in the restaurant. The atmosphere that the consumers feel is the key issue to the research. And atmosphere can involve the music in the restaurant, the style of the furniture, other customers, serves been provided. One question cant cover all these points, but with small individual questions each part of the atmosphere can be asked, by join all these qualitative questions, the holistic view is build up. Alan Wilson described several types of research most suited to qualitative research in his book. Qualitative research is commonly used in three areas: exploratory research, new product development and creative development research. Exploratory research Exploratory research always been used when a company decide to improve the understanding of consumer behaviors, emotions, attitudes and preference. For instance, more than one characteristic that the researchers would like to understand though the exploratory, they are: consumer perceptions of a product field, identifying service or product improvements, the decision making process, dimensions that differentiate brands, product usage patterns and behavior and customer segments. Using qualitative research in exploratory research will help the organization with object or information defines. New product development In the new product development stage, qualitative research is also quite useful. It is effective to use qualitative research to find out the reaction of customers about the new product concepts and designs. In the stage of developing the concept into a communicable form, it is the time to use qualitative research to determine if the concept is developable, or guide the designers to improve the concept. Later stage of product development can also use qualitative research, such as stage of design the paradigm of new product, or their packaging. Using qualitative research can help researchers build up confidence that the new product is developing though the right way. Creative development research Qualitative research is very important in creative development research; it can assist in creating execution of advertising and promotion. Advertising agency uses qualitative research to know the relationship between customers and products or brands. As same as advertising, in an organizations promotion plan, qualitative research can help the organization to achieve the communication objectives. Not only promotion but also the integrated marketing communication plan (IMC plan), which contents promotion and four other steps. Feedbacks, which could test the effectiveness of the IMC plan, are received though qualitative research. Quantitative research Quantitative research is a full structured research approach, which involves large sample of individuals. The purpose of quantitative research is to measure the widespread of same attitudes and behaviors. Choose the method for collecting primary data In this step marketers will choose their method to collect primary data. All the methods can be divided into two kinds, survey method and observation method. Survey method. Survey method always involves three things, question, interviewer and respondent. The survey method can be divided into four categories by how does the questions been asked by the interviewers to the respondent. Postal survey In postal survey, selected responders will receive a mail with questionnaires, covering letter return envelope inside. Although the postal survey is a very important survey method and has been used for long time, the response rates are not high; it is between 20% to 50%. There are some advantages and disadvantages been list out by peter chisnall Advantages: Nation and international coverage Low cost No interviewer bias Respondent convenience Good for ongoing research Piggybacking Disadvantages: Low response rate Biased response Long respond time Inflexible questionnaire Unclear of who is responding Telephone survey The majority of telephone surveys are taken for customer-type research and business to business. All interviewers stay in a same place call centre location, all the calls are made though the phones in centre location, this makes the interviewers been easily controlled. Fast and low cost are the other main advantages of this survey method. On the other hand, the disadvantages also very obvious, for example, short interview time can make a lot of misunderstandings to the question, sometimes customers do not answer the call, and consumers who do not have a phone cant be interviewed. These days more and more marketers pretend doing telephone survey but in fact trying to sell their products to the responders. This situation makes customers more unwilling to pick up phones to do telephone surveys. Face to face interviews There are three types of face to face interviews, in-home or doorstep, executive and street. They all share same advantages, such as; it is easier for interviewers to motivate respondents to complete the survey; long questions can only be used through this kind of survey; interview can easily tell if the responders have difficulties in understanding of the question; the interviewer can use different materials to help with the survey. To the opposite side, the major disadvantages are the high cost that the interview could take and the interviewer bias a problem. Online questionnaires This is a new kind of survey method compare to the three methods analysis above. The keep increasing number of internet users makes online survey more and more popular. Like the telephone survey, the online survey also very fast and lost low. It is not like face to face interview because there is no interview bias but also different materials can be used during the survey. Observation method Observation method is quite different from survey method. It does not communicate with the people; interviewers only have to record the respondents reaction, behavior and attitude. It could happen in a natural or contrived environment. Compare observation method to survey method, the major advantage is; there are no reporting bias and potential bias in observation method. And the main disadvantage of observation is, it is only useful to measure or record behavior and attitude. Design the sample Sample is a subgroup of the elements of the population selected for participation in the study (Malhotra, N. 1999). Design a sample in fact is a process of answering five questions: What type of people is going to do this study? Where those people are coming from? How to select these people? How many people are here in the study? How to represent the information collected from the study? By answering the five questions, the sample design process can be divided into six steps: Define the population Determine the sampling frame Select sampling techniques Determine the sample size Execute the sampling process Validate the sample

Cell Phone Design Operation Management

Shortening the duration of the project As the duration of the project is directly dependent on the duration of critical path, we should make the critical path shorter; in this case we need to re-plan the project. Manager should shorten the duration or work on a task on the critical path, this can have a significant impact on the overall duration of the project, or they should change a task constraint to allow for more scheduling flexibility.We have a number of options and we should assess the impact of each on the project’s cost, quality and time required to complete it. For example, we should increase resource available for each project activity to bring down time spent on each but the impact of some of this would be insignificant and a more efficient way of doing this would be to look only at activities on the critical path. Adding more resources to a project to shorten its duration is called crashing. We should do the crash action to shorten the critical path but In some si tuations.Shortening the original critical path of a project can lead to a different series of activities becoming the critical path, so the management should be aware of this. As our information is limited in this case we can’t analysis the cost of putting more resources on some activities to speed it up by analyzing the original cost, crash cost we can estimate the crash cost per week we can compute the crash result and have enough information for cost analysis and make decision. We can use the pert analysis and crash action to shorten the project’s duration by shortening the factors of critical path.Some possible ideas for shortening the duration of subproject of the critical path are completing the software supplier specification in 4 weeks rather than 6 weeks, this would shorten the project by two weeks by putting additional input on this section but it will raise the project cost, the other one is D7, if we put more resources on this project and finish it in 2 wee ks as it is a constraint for D1 and both of them are in critical path it will reduce the duration of project significantly, by combination of these two we will reduce the duration by 4 weeks, from 36 weeks to 32 weeks, but as it was mentioned before the cost analysis is still important in making decision.The other change that I recommend is they should break a critical task into smaller tasks that can be worked on simultaneously by different resources, for example the functionality can be divided in to two tasks which one of them is relevant to camera and the other one relevant to user interface, in this case not only the duration of the task will change but the constraints of this task will also l change relatively so this also will reduce the duration of the project. In general they should revise task dependencies to allow more scheduling flexibility, and for additional resources they can schedule overtime to assign additional resources to work on critical path tasks, because by b ringing new staff in the project the alignment and interrelationship between teams will be another problem that should be solved. By Microsoft project management we can have more detail analysis of cost such as crash, perk analysis, milestones and the overall of project running, attached are the same analysis from MS project.

Lab Exercise Computer Systems Architecture - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 1 Words: 339 Downloads: 10 Date added: 2017/09/23 Category Advertising Essay Type Argumentative essay Tags: Computer Essay Did you like this example? Lab Exercise 2. 03: Recognizing External Connections Is it possible to plug any cable into the wrong connector? If so, which one(s)? What do you think would happen if you plugged something into the wrong connector? Answer- Yes, the mouse and keyboard connectors. If they plug into the wrong connector, the device will not work. DATA-CABLE from printer to the PC (both ends) End 1 (PC) USBEnd 2 Parallel Port Male or Female: MaleEnd 2 Female Number of Pins:25 Data cable from the keyboard to the pc Mini-DinMini-Din Port MaleFemale 7 pins Data cable from mouse to the PC Mini-DinMini-Din Port MaleFemale 7 pins Data Cable from the network to the PC RJ-45RJ-11 MaleMale 1 hole Data Cable from the internal modem to the telephone jack RJ-11Jack MaleFemale 1 hole STEP 9 Cable TypeConnector Type Keyboard CableMini-Din Mouse CableMini-Din Speaker Cablemini-audio connector Monitor data cable15 pin DB Female Printer data cableparallel 25 pin DB male Printer data cable25 pin DB female Networ k data cableRJ-45 Modem/Telephone wireRJ-11 Step 10- Identify the connectors pictured next. What is the name of each connector and what does it connect to? A. JackF. USB PORT B. VESA PortG. Mini-Din C. Parallel portH. HDMI D. RJ-45I. Serial Port E. DVI Lab Exercise 2. 05: Disassembling the system unit and identifying internal components Look inside the PC and find the expansion slots. How many total expansion cards can be plugged into your system? 9 total expansion cards. How many Ram modules do you have? 2 ram modules Do you have Dual inline memory modules or single? There are Dual inline memory modules. Step 16 ID JG BF EC AH Lab analysis Test 1. Joe could have plugged the keyboard plug into the mouse port. 2. The floppy disk may not be compatible with the format. I suggest using a CD-ROM 3. First thing to check is if its plugged into the computer, or if the volume is on, on the computer. 4. He should check his phone line is connected properly 5. She could have loosened the hard drive by accident. Key term Quiz 1. data cable 2. LED 3. CTRL Key 4. ESD 5. Function Key Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Lab Exercise: Computer Systems Architecture" essay for you Create order

What Is The Internet Of Things - 1483 Words

What is the Internet of Things? Essentially the IoT is â€Å"the connection of any device with an on and off switch to the Internet and/or to each other.† [1] This can include many devices such as refrigerators, printers and much more. The IoT is not limited to the devices but possibly the devices components as well such as the engine of a semi-Truck. â€Å"The analyst firm Gartner says that by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected devices.†[1]. Based on statistics from Gartner and other firms it is obvious to anyone that the Iot of things will only grow as the years go on. Many will see the growing Iot to be a helpful and in many ways it will be because of the â€Å"things† it can do. A simple example could be that a printer would recognize when†¦show more content†¦What are the dangers of the IoT and do the dangers out way the risks? With advancements in technology all devices are becoming connected and these devices â€Å"speak† with ea ch other. Through this communication a large amount of data is created all based around an individual. This information could range anywhere from the individuals daily schedule to their own medical information. Fitbit is an excellent example of one’s general health being monitored. â€Å"During the day, [Fitbit] tracks your steps, distance, calories burned, and stairs climbed. Come nightfall, it measures your sleep quality, helps you learn how to sleep better, and wakes you in the morning. The Oneâ„ ¢ motivates you to reach your goals by bringing greater fitness into your life – seamlessly, socially, 24 hours a day.†[2] Now a scenario provided by SC magazine certainly helps to illustrate why being monitored could be considered a benefit or an issue. A person using Fitbit has their fitness information sold to a third party through their mobile phone carrier. Then based on the user’s location (provided by their phone) they begin to receive coupons for a weight loss shake because based off of the Fitbit data that appears to be what the person is doing. Many will see such invasiveness as a benefit but by others it will seem like an invasion of privacy. The worst issue is someone hacking the data and