Chapter 4: Marketing Research: Gather, Analyze, and Use Information (100) * Why do we do research: to reduce uncertainty of decision making (do we go or no go with the idea) * Research done via: * Primary data collecting: data from research conducted to help make a specific decision. It includes information gathered directly from respondents to specifically address the question at hand. Includes demographic and psychological information about customers and prospective customers, customers’ attitudes and opinions about products and competing products, as well as their awareness or knowledge about a product and their beliefs about the people who use those products. * Secondary data: data that has been collected for some purpose other than the problem at hand. Saves the firm time and money because the expense to design and implement a study that has already been incurred. * Government collects every 10 years to accurately represent us in Congress; we use it as secondary research. * Data Mining: Process in which analysts sift through data (often measured in terabytes- much larger than kilobytes or gigabytes) to identify unique patters of behavior among different customer groups. Data mining used computers that run sophisticated programs so that analysts can combine different databases to understand relationships among buying decisions, exposure to marketing messages, and in-store promotions. These operations are so complex that companies often need to build a data warehouse simply to store and process the data. Data mining has 4 primary applications for marketers: * Customer Acquisition: many firms include demographic and other info about customers in their database. Ex: store member apps * Customer Retention and Loyalty: firm identifies big spending customers and then targets them for special offers and inducements other customers wont receive. Keeping the most profitable customers coming back is a great way to build business success because keeping customers is less expensive than constantly finding new ones * Customer Abandonment: sometimes a firm wants customers to take their business elsewhere because servicing them actually costs the firm too much. Today, this is called “firing a customer.” * Market Basket Analysis: develops focused promotional strategies based on the records of which customers have bought certain products * Steps in the Marketing Research Process: 1. Define the Research Problem: Specify the research objectives; identify the consumer population of interest; place the problem in an environmental context. 2. Determine the Research Design (which specifies exactly what info marketers will collect and what type of study they will do): determine whether secondary data are available, determine whether primary data are required * Exploratory Research: technique that marketers use to generate insights for future, more rigorous studies. Focus Group: technique that marketing researchers use most often for collecting exploratory data; typically consists of 5-9 consumers who have been recruited because they share certain characteristics. They sit together to discuss a product, ad, or some other marketing topic a discussion leader introduces. Case study: comprehensive examination of a particular firm or organization. Ethnography: approach to research based on observations of people in their own homes or communities. * Descriptive Research: tool that probes more systematically into the problem and bases its conclusions on large numbers of observations. Cross- sectional design: a type of descriptive technique that involves the systematic collection of quantitative info. Longitudinal Design: technique that tracks the responses of the same sample of respondents over time. * Casual Research: attempts to identify cause and effect relationships. Marketers use it if they want to know a change in something. The factors that might cause such a
