- •Marketing research: From Information To Action
- •The role of marketing research
- •What is Marketing Research?
- •Why good marketing research is difficult?
- •Five-step marketing research approach to making better decisions
- •Identify Possible Marketing Actions
- •Identify Data Needed for Marketing Actions
- •Internal Secondary Data
- •Using Information Technology to Trigger Marketing Actions
- •Implement the Action Recommendations
- •Chapter in review
- •Identify the reason for doing marketing research, and describe the five-step marketing research approach leading to marketing actions.
- •Describe how secondary and primary data are used in marketing, including the uses of questionnaires, observations, experiments, and panels.
- •Explain how information technology and data mining link massive amounts of marketing information to meaningful marketing actions.
- •Focusing on key terms
- •Introduction Neuroscientific Contributions to Marketing Research
- •Selected Neurophysiological Methods for Marketing Research
- •Using the Frontal Asymmetry Paradigm to Assess Emotions in Advertising Theoretical Background
- •The Frontal Asymmetry Paradigm in Televised Advertising Tests
- •Measures of Visual Attention Using Eye-Tracking History and Theoretical Background
- •Selected Research Areas
- •Eye Tracking in Market Research
- •Integration with eeg: What Do People Feel When They Look? Shortcomings in Standalone Applications
- •The Integrated Approach
- •Implications for Interactive Advertising New Opportunities for Research
- •Challenges
- •Concluding Remarks
- •Footnotes
- •References
- •About the Authors
Identify Possible Marketing Actions
Effective decision makers develop specific measures of success, which are criteria or standards used in evaluating proposed solutions to a problem. Different research outcomes - based on the measure of success - lead to different marketing actions. For the Fisher-Price problem, if a measure of success were the total time children spent playing with each of the two telephone designs, the results of observing them would lead to clear-cut actions as follows:
Measure of Success: Playtime
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Possible Marketing Action
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One test of whether marketing research should be done is if different outcomes will lead to different marketing actions. If all the research outcomes lead to the same action - such as top management sticking with the older design regardless of what the observed children liked - the research is useless and a waste of money. In this causal research study, results showed that kids liked the new design, so Fisher-Price introduced its noisemaking pull-toy Chatter Telephone, which became a toy classic and sold millions.
Digital Research, Inc., a marketing research firm, evaluates almost 500 new toys from more than 160 toy manufacturers to select Family Fun magazine’s Toy of the Year award. More than 700 children “toy testers” are involved. And they’ve been right on the money in selecting Barney the TV dinosaur, Tickle Me Elmo, and Fisher-Price’s Love to Dance Bear™ as hot toys - ones that jumped off retailers’ shelves. But sometimes they are wrong. Forecasting which toys are hot is critical for retailers, which must place orders to manufacturers 8 to 10 months before Christmas shoppers walk into their stores. Bad forecasts can lead to lost sales for understocks and severe losses for overstocks.
Marketing researchers know that defining a problem is an incredibly difficult task. For example, if the objectives are too broad, the problem may not be researchable. If they are too narrow, the value of the research results may be seriously lessened. This is why marketing researchers spend so much time in defining a marketing problem precisely and writing a formal proposal that describes the research to be done.
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STEP 2: DEVELOP THE RESEARCH PLAN
The second step in the marketing research process involves (1) specifying the constraints on the marketing research activity, (2) identifying the data needed for marketing decisions, and (3) determining how to collect the data.
Specify Constraints
The constraints in a decision are the restrictions placed on potential solutions to a problem. Common constraints in marketing problems are limitations on the time and money available to solve the problem. Thus, Fisher-Price might set two constraints on its decision to select either the old or new version of the Chatter Telephone: The decision must be made in 10 weeks and no research budget is available beyond that needed for collecting data in its nursery school.