Baker MKTG 470 Exam 1
Basic Research
(Fundamental Research) Seeks to extend the boundaries of knowledge in a given area and doesn't necessarily solve your immediate problems. Nevertheless, it has useful applications. It reveals information and relationships that could be useful at a later date. Science / Academic. Answers broad truths about how humans behave in the marketplace. No explicit, direct recommendation for any marketer, but could be useful to a marketer; if results are true, how could they apply to our unique circumstance?
Causal Research
(WHY experiments) Associative variation, sequence of events, and absence of other possible causal factors are the types of evidence used to establish causal relationships.
Eye Tracking
- Essential for understanding good User-Interface/Advertisement Design - Camera on glasses (middle) tracks what the consumer is looking at - Camera on bottom of the glasses tracking where a person's eyes moved - Heat maps track what people spend the most time looking at
Cons of Non-Mechanical Observational Research
- Generalizability concerns because of small sample size - Observers of consumer behavior now become a source of subjectivity - Motivations, attitudes, and the "why" of behaviors are a black box
Pros of Non-Mechanical Observational Research
- Insights into actual behavior rather than reported behavior - No recall error risk (unconscious biased reporting) - No risk of intentional false response (conscious biased reporting)
Using Multiple Items to Measure Subjective Properties
- It may be unlikely that a single question is capable of perfectly capturing the concept. - If we use multiple items, we will be able to capture all of the different subtle domains of that concept.
"Always Do" Rules of Questionnaire Design
- The question should be focused on a single issue or topic - The question should be brief - The question should be grammatically simple, if possible - The question should be crystal clear (equally understood by all respondents) - Potential responses should always be exhaustive
"Never Do" Rules of Questionnaire Design
- The question should not "lead" the respondent to a particular answer - The question should not have "loaded" wording or phrasing - The question should not be "double-barreled" - The question should not use words that overstate the condition, do not use "dramatics"
Steps in MR process
1. Figure out problem to solve 2. Design the Research 3. Collect the Data 4. Analyze & Communicate
Motivations
1. Manifest (surface level) motivations - what consumers think drives their decisions 2. Psychological motivations - latent (underlying) motivations
A marketing research question is potentially worth investigating if:
1. We have the necessary time, money, and resources to conduct adequate MR. 2. Marketing Conditions Trigger Need for MR 3. Management is Willing to Take Action 4. Management and the MR Team is Able to Translate the Business Problem into Something Amendable to Empirical Evidence.
Focus Group Setup
6 to 12 participants of the population of interest. 1 moderator guiding the flow of the conversation. Props included as necessary (concept boards, videos, products, etc.). Video, audio recording of focus group - usually a brief survey as well. Marketing managers viewing behind glass. Generally, about 1.5 to 2 hours of total time for participants.
Beliefs
A degree to which a consumer believes something to be true. A consumer's belief could be objectively true, false, or undeterminable. A consumer's belief could be based on extensive, thoughtful, justification, or based on little to no critical thought. Changing someone's beliefs is very tricky. As marketers, we measure beliefs not to change them, but to realize that they are solid rocks that we have to work our marketing around rather than trying to alter.
Mechanical Observational Research
A device (camcorder) observes the behavior and may even perform the coding/quantification of observations.
Human Observational Research
A human observer is directly responsible for observing and coding the observations.
Lifestyle
A particular way of living: the way a person lives or a group of people live. - Marketing researchers may use questionnaire items to categorize demographically similar consumers into distinct lifestyle categories.
Hypothesis
A research hypothesis is an unambiguous claim about what the researcher believes they will find after completing the study. Not all studies have research hypotheses. Exploratory studies rarely, if ever, have hypotheses. Making a hypothesis is based off of previous research, managerial assumptions, or theory guides it.
3 Conditions that trigger a need for research
A state of uncertainty ... ... in need of explanation ... ... with an audience who will care if it is solved.
Descriptive Primary Research Example
Collecting survey data to understand common cell/smart phone usage behaviors of teens by age, gender and phone type.
Demographic/Socioeconomic
Comparing/merging primary data collection with information from secondary data sources. Used to set the initial boundaries of market segments. Ex: Nielsen PRIZM System
Primary Research
Conduct yourself for a very specific purpose. Research question that you have, you design the study, you collect the data, analyze the data & you present the results.
Causal Primary Research Example
Conducting a conjoint analysis experiment to determine the 'optimal' bundle of attributes to offer for a new touchscreen laptop. - Identify trade-off points for different features to ultimately establish a fair price of the product.
External Sources of Secondary Data
Data that you obtain from outside sources. External data is available in staggering amounts and assortments. It is often available for major types of marketing research, focusing on non-controllable aspects of the problem (total market size; market characteristics; competitor products, prices, promotion efforts, and distribution needs).
Eye Tracking: Aggregate Gaze
Different flavor of a heat map, but each individual eye-tracking observation is kept separate.
(Near) End of Questionnaire
Difficult or complicated questions Demographic / classification Thank you / Final comments
Loaded Questions
Encourages extreme response, subsequent contamination of later responses. - "As a baseball fan, what year did you stop tolerating the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball?"
Internal Sources of Secondary Data
Extensive amounts of customer / consumer information collected routinely as part of business and marketing operations. Companies receive orders, fill orders, record costs, receive warranty cards, submit sales reports, and make engineering reports. Even though this information is collected for other purposes, you can easily access it for a research project. Company must have an effective information system.
Facial Expression Analysis
Facial Action Coding System (FACS) AFFECTIVA - 7 emotional states
Focus Group Purpose
Generating new marketing ideas (4 P's) to explore more rigorously in the future. Providing an initial idea for how consumers react to product concepts/advertising messaging. Discovering the words/language consumers use to describe your product, service experience, retail environment, etc. Identifying issues salient to consumers but unknown to markets. Identifying the right things to study in the future with either descriptive or causal research.
GfK Index Values
Give you a sense of how people meet the criteria displayed in a row match up with the probability that they exhibit the particular behavior under study relative to the base. - Index Value > 100: Someone who meets this row criteria are more likely than a typical US adult to exhibit this behavior.
Ratio
Highest level of data. True zero. Equal distance between options.
Observing Behavior
In the world of Big Data and extensive online tracking of consumer behavior, many consumer behaviors, including those preceding purchase, are now trackable. Scanner data and web analytics are both observed behaviors.
Secondary Data
Information that has previously been gathered by someone other than the researcher and/or for some other purpose than the research project at hand. This information is often found in outside sources. However, don't overlook your own company's records or your competitors' open records. Such information can help build a strong foundation for your research project. Secondary data allows both management and researchers to make critical decisions about a research problem.
Primary Data
Information that is developed or gathered by the researcher specifically for the research project at hand. Respondents are asked questions while the researcher collects the responses. These can be verbal or written. Responses can also be observed via the respondent's behavior. Collecting primary data is vital in finding solutions to research problems.
Mean
Interval, Ratio
Variance, SD
Interval, Ratio
Beginning of Questionnaire
Introduction / Cover Letter Screening Questions Warm-Up Questions
Descriptive Research
Main intention is to quantify something; who, what, where, when, & how. Want specific, rigorous quantities; percentages, counts, correlations, & differences in averages. Will help you find your market and understand your customer. Necessary to focus your project and resources.
Awareness
Marketers often think about consumer path to purchase as beginning with awareness. In turn, awareness is frequently measured in marketing research. Useful to track awareness longitudinally to check for baseline performance of advertising campaigns.
Syndicated Data/Research
Marketing research performed by another company; organizations pay for access to the information. Could be primary or secondary data.
Interval
Measuring subjective properties. Zero is arbitrary. Equal distance between options.
Subjective Properties
Mental constructs, they live up in the mind. These are not things that we can directly see. Constructs are abstract ideas that cannot be directly observed yet we are able to define and, ultimately, measure (indirectly). Brand loyalty and satisfaction are examples of two common constructs in marketing. Scaling is used when we are assigning numerical scores to subjective properties. Subjective properties cannot be directly observed because they are mental constructs, such as a person's attitudes, opinions, or intentions. For subjective properties, researchers must translate mental constructs onto an intensity continuum. - The construct must first be clearly defined - Then, based on this definition, a concrete tool to measure the construct is developed - Translating a construct/concept into something that can really be measured is called operationalization.
Applied Research
More immediate and pragmatic. Very specific marketing problem targeting a specific business and a study was designed and set out to answer that question specifically. Gather information to solve a specific problem or set of problems. You would use this information to tune your business plan, focus your advertising campaign, or improve your product.
Eye Tracking: Heat Maps
Most powerful when comparing different stimuli (A/B Tests) or different groups.
Nielson Segment Distribution Report
Must know that the Nielsen PRIZM System is an effort to segment every household into 60 different potential lifestyle segments, an "off-the-shelf" market segmentation solution useful to a wide array of different marketers. The Nielsen PRIZM Premier System segments households into three broad categories: younger years, family life, and mature years. It segments each by its affluents, low to high, and then into geographic quadrants: urban, suburban, second city and town/rural.
Research Questions
Must separate symptoms from potential causes (the Iceberg Principle). Symptoms are easily visible by the marketing manager, but research questions should be based on potential true root causes of the symptom. All research questions must be objectively answered with empirical data. By answering research questions, we might be able to give intelligent, thoughtful, helpful advice to marketing managers. In other words, by answering research questions, we may be in a better position to help the manager solve their business problem.
Exploratory Primary Research Example
Shadowing various B2B sales teams in an organization to develop a broad understanding of various teamwork habits, sales techniques, and common pitfalls. - Looking open mindedly to a variety of things they may do, you don't know precisely what you are looking for yet. You are searching for things that might intrigue you.
Leading Questions
Signal to the survey participant a "correct" way to answer a question. Encourages acquiescence bias and "good subject" bias.
Designing Questionnaire Items (GOALS)
The goal is to create questions that are: (1) Understandable and Unambiguous, all respondents interpret the question in the same manner. (2) Unbiased, the characteristics of the question do not exert influence on how someone responds to the question. If we achieve this, we will likely have reliable and valid data.
Implicit Association Test
The most common approach to rigorously measure someone's implicit associations. Four categories; good/bad words and then the variables you are studying such as fat/thin or black/white. The test is measured by speed of clicking.
Explicit Attitudes
The most commonly measured in marketing research. They are "explicit" because it is one that someone deliberately thinks about and reports upon. Marketers typically measure explicit attitudes, despite awareness of the importance of implicit attitudes.
Unstructured Observational Research
The observation is broad and ill-defined, "look out for things that seem interesting, important, and different".
Structured Observational Research
The observation is directed at a specific set of concretely defined behaviors.
Operational Definitions
The specific way in which it is measured in that study. Another study might measure the same conceptual measure differently.
Backward Telescoping Bias
Things that happen in the near timeline are often biased a little further into the past.
Recalling Behavior
Accurate memory and reporting can be challenging for respondents. People tend to be both inaccurate and biased in recalling whenand the number of timesa particular even occurred. People tend to perform better at recalling if a specific event occurred at least once within a defined range of time.
Galvanic Skin Response
Active sweat glands secrete moisture through pores towards the skin surface. This makes electrical current flows more readily, resulting in measurable changes in skin conductance. The impact of any emotionally arousing content can be tested - actual physical objects, videos, images, sounds, odors, food probes and other sensory stimuli as well as thought experiments and mental images. GSR measures only one dimension (rather noisily).
Types of Primary Data
All variables are ultimately trying to serve the grand purpose of understanding, predicting, and controlling human behavior. 1. Demographic/SocioEconomic 2. Personality/Lifestyle 3. Awareness 4. Knowledge 5. Attitudes 6. Beliefs 7. Motivations 8. Intentions 9. Satisfaction 10. Behavior
Descriptive Secondary Research Example
Analyzing U.S. Census data to develop market segments based on geography and income
Exploratory Secondary Research Example
Analyzing recorded customer service calls to develop an understanding of triggers that escalate/defuse irate customer.
Implicit Attitudes
Are positive and negative evaluations that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control. Even if you say that you like math (your explicit attitude), it is possible that you associate math with negativity without knowing it. In this case, we would say that your implicit attitude toward math is negative. Sometimes our explicit attitudes may not line up with what our implicit attitudes are.
Awareness Purchasing Funnel
Awareness Opinion Consideration Preference Purchase
Intentions
Behavioral intentions are anticipated or planned future behavior. Research suggest changes in intentions tend to only result in small changes in actual behavior. Similarly, purchase intention questions tend to perform poorly as predictors of actual marketplace behavior, although the intention and purchase correlation does tend to be weakly to moderately positive. However, intention data remains extremely popular for sales forecasting, predicting market share, estimating performance of new products, and identifying appealing/unappealing market segments.
Mode
Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, Ratio
Use of Dramatic/Descriptive Words
Not all descriptive words have equal intensity. Be mindful about using descriptive words that are not excessively emotionally intense. This is especially a big issue when you intend to compare/contrast multiple questions. Implies agenda, triggers many of the aforementioned problems.
Protocol Analysis
Observation based research blended with communication based research - A rigorous methodology for eliciting verbal reports of thought sequences as a valid source of data on thinking
Contrived Observational Research
Observation occurs in a contrived setting, like a research lab or a real-world environment that was purposefully altered by the researcher.
Natural Observational Research
Observation occurs in a natural, real-world setting.
Garbology
Observe the trash that people throw away to make inferences about what their previous behaviors were
Observational Research
Observes consumer behavior to collect data rather than directly interacting (communicating) with consumers during the data collection process. Observational and communication-based research are often blended together, as each information-gathering mechanism is used to compliment the limitations of the other.
Median
Ordinal, Interval, Ratio
Middle of Questionnaire
Organized blocks of conceptual areas, transitions placed before each conceptual are Use "skip" / "flow" logical operators to avoid unnecessary questions
Forward Telescoping Bias
Person will likely guess that this behavior occurred much more recent than it did.
Nielson Simply Maps
Platform that allows you to explore, analyze, & generate visualizations of secondary data coming from a variety of different sources. - Focuses on geographic areas
Causal Secondary Research Example
Post-hoc analysis of test marketing results by incorporating competitive reactions. - Natural experiment, rather than a formal experiment that we do ourselves, something spontaneously happens in the real world that we argue that something that happened out in the environment, actually effectively makes something like an experiment. Comparing treatment and control.
Focus Groups
Probably the most ubiquitous form of exploratory marketing research. They are probably one of the most misunderstood forms of marketing research because they are one of the most abused forms of marketing research. Focus groups are notmeant to address research questions that require descriptive or causal research.
Secondary Research
Produced by someone else, but you intend to make use of it. Quicker, faster, & more convenient. But it may not be perfectly designed for your needs.
Ordinal
Rank order, but cannot determine the precise distance between options.
Business Problems
Rarely come in a format correctly packaged for research. Business problems are usually phrased as a request for normative advice about the correct action to take. Or, they are a complaint about symptoms, not necessarily underlying causes. Research outcomes never directly provide normative advice. Good research provides objective information that, if interpreted and generalized appropriately, can shape normative advice.
Personality
Refers to individual differences in characteristic patters of thinking, feeling & behaving. Big Five Personality Traits OCEAN: Openness to experience Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism (or Emotional Stability)
Personality/Lifestyle
Related concepts in marketing, often used interchangeably. Personality tends to focus on 'state of mind' while lifestyle tends to emphasize marketplace behaviors. Marketing practitioners tend to treat personality and lifestyle characteristics as essentially fixed in consumers. Useful for "high resolution" market segmentation. Deeper insights beyond mere demographic marketers provide hints on how to: Shape tone & content of marketing communications, Position brand to align with target market, Identify untapped/underserved groups within course market segments, & Identify media and retail channels with high densities of audience.
Eye Tracking: Areas of Interest
Researcher pre-defined areas that have been designated as particularly important for investigation.
Nielson Market Potential Report
Select a couple of key variables and it will give you a sense about how different geographic markets compare with respect to the particular variables selected.
Eye Tracking: Fixation Sequences
Sequencing fixations in order. Time to first fixation is a common metric for area of interest. Order of attention is common as well.
Subjective Knowledge
Someone's belief about their level of knowledge about a topic.
Objective Knowledge
Someone's demonstrable knowledge about a topic. Can identify gaps between product benefits/uses.
Attitudes
Someone's overall expression of liking/disliking toward a person, idea, object, or any other clearly defined target. Attitude measurement is extremely common in primary data collection of marketing research.Someone's attitude toward a particular thing is a good leading predictor of whether they are interested in it or might be willing to purchase it. Measuring consumer attitudes towards ads, brands, products, services, etc. form an essential basis of many marketing models for: brand preference, market share, and sales forecast. Detailed attitude evaluations provide insights for: product development and marketing communication campaigns.
Double Barreled Questions
Technically impossible to answer. Need to split into 2 different questions.
Satisfaction
The degree to which a product, service, or consumption experience performs relative to the consumer's expectations. Likely the most commonly measured construct in marketing research. Definitions of satisfaction suggest two things need to be measured to know a customer's satisfaction: expectations and evaluative performance. In practice, most satisfaction measures presume that consumers understand satisfaction as relative to their expectations. Satisfaction is known to be a predictor of customer retention, market share, sales, and profitability. Satisfaction data often used in CRM systems to proactively manage the efforts of service personnel.
Undisguised Observational Research
Those being observed are aware they are being observed for research purposes.
Disguised Observational Research
Those being observed are not aware of the observation occurring.
Descriptive Research Objective
To describe and measure marketing phenomena at a point (or points) in time.
Causal Research Objective
To determine causality, to make "if-then" statements ... how one thing affects another. Find out the relationship between a specific cause and a specific effect.
Exploratory Research Objective
To gain background information, to define terms, to clarify problems and hypotheses, to establish research priorities. Keep your project manageable.
Exploratory Research
You know that there is something worth studying, but you are unclear about what is exactly going on that you aren't able to formalize a precise research question yet. The problem finding phase, that forces you to focus the scope of your project and helps you anticipate the problems and variables that might arise in your project. Usually encompass literature search, expert interviews, and case studies.
Demand Effects
You might consciously make a choice to engage in different behavior than you normally would because they are trying to guess what the expectations of the research study are.
Nominal
Two options. Use only labels, or the number is arbitrary. Used to categorize things.
Biometric Research Methods
Used to capture tiny, instantaneous behaviors and physiological reactions of consumers to infer the rapid, unconscious decision-making processes that predominate their everyday experiences.
Demographic
Variables commonly used to characterize the composition of human populations. Tend to be objectively verifiable traits of people, rather than measures of someone's internal mental state. - Age, income, family size, occupation, education, religion, gender, & race/ethnicity (commonly collected by government agencies). - Race/ethnicity is not an objective trait of an individual because it is based upon self-identification.
Socioeconomic
Variables that are often used in relation to determining someone's socioeconomic status (SES). - Income, education, occupational prestige.
Behavior
What individuals have done or are doing. A physical activity or action that takes place under specific circumstances, at a particular time, and involves one or more actors or participants.
Hawthorne/Observer Effect
You behave differently while being watched.