Marketing Research
Select a product with a marketing problem (of your choice) and write a three- to four- page paper (excluding the title and reference pages) based on the issues below. Be sure to follow APA formatting and use a minimum of three scholarly sources from the Ashford University Library, in addition to the textbook.
Describe the primary marketing problem facing the product you have chosen.
Describe three sources of secondary information that might be in the company’s marketing information system.
Describe two types of proprietary corporate information that the company might collect for its marketing information system.
Explain why you think the information in the marketing information system could help solve the marketing problem facing the company OR why the company would need to gather additional primary information.
Chron.com lists some common problems in marketing here… You can use this as a starting point
Poor Survey Design
Organizations use marketing research to find out what customers think and what they want. The survey is a direct way of collecting quantitative, or numerical, information and qualitative, or descriptive, information. When there are errors in the survey design, marketing research problems can surface.
For example, a company might use a method that is designed to collect a random sample from the target consumer population, but the method is not really random. Therefore, the organization cannot generalize its survey results to represent the target population. Similarly, poorly-worded survey questions can lead to ambiguous results from respondents who didn’t grasp the intent of the question.
Survey Nonresponse
One marketing research problem relates to how the survey is offered to the target population. Marketers design a survey that many customers choose not to respond to. They look at reasons why people don’t want to participate, and they might reach conclusions such as the survey takes too much effort or that the incentive for participation is not appealing to respondents.
Tip
- Survey respondents are rarely willing to spend more than a few minutes on a voluntary survey. For longer efforts, consider offering some sort of compensation such as cash, a gift card, or a free product to encourage participation.
The Problem of Survey Bias
A survey might include one or more sources of bias. Marketers might believe, for example, that they have created an online survey to appeal to respondents of all ethnic backgrounds, but the survey questions, and even images, might be biased to favor one ethnic group or could offend one or more ethnic groups.
The famous image of the “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline in 1948 was the result of survey bias. The journalists had surveyed voters by telephone, thereby missing the opinions of the many voters that did not have telephones at the time.
A survey’s format and content must be acceptable to all audiences from which marketers seek to gather information.
Issues with Observation Research
Some marketing research involves observing consumers in action and noting their preferences. Marketers can become intrusive, interfering with a consumer’s experience to the point that a consumer feels disgusted and leaves the business site. For example, a fast-food chain’s researchers need to determine if there is a need for a new location of its store so they survey people going through the drive-through line. Although researchers conduct a short survey, they aggravate customers by slowing down the line.
Tip
- A market survey is a more complicated undertaking than it might, at first, appear. You might want to employ the services of marketing professionals if you do not have someone on staff with survey design experience.
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