Marketing Research
for
Managerial
Decision Making
McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2010 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights
reserved.
Outline
What is Marketing Research?
Task in the process
How does Marketing Research benefit
Marketing Decisions?
Sources of Ethical Dilemmas
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What is Marketing Research?
Marketing research is the function that links
an organization to its market through the
gathering of information
It facilitates the identification and definition
of market-driven opportunities and problems,
the development and evaluation of marketing
actions
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Tasks in the Process
Designing methods for collecting data
Managing the information collection process
Analyzing and interpreting results
Communicating findings to decision makers
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Research Benefits Marketing Decisions
Situation analysis
Strategy design
Program development
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Marketing Situation Analysis
Monitors the appropriateness of a firm’s
marketing strategy and determines whether
changes are necessary
Opportunity assessment
Market segmentation
Competition analysis
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Situation Analysis Research Can
Locate and identify new market opportunities
for a company (opportunity assessment)
Identify segments of customers within a
product-market (segmentation)
Identify existing and potential competitor’s
strengths and weaknesses (competition
analysis)
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Opportunity assessment
It involves collecting market information to
forecast changes. Three common approaches:
Content analysis: researchers analyze various
trade publications, newspaper articles, academic
literature, Web sites, or computer databases for
information on trends in a given industry.
In-depth interviews: researchers conduct formal,
structured interviews with experts in a given
field.
Formal rating procedures: researchers use
structured questionnaires to gather information on 1-
Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Market Segmentation
Benefit and lifestyle studies can examine
similarities and differences in consumers’ needs.
This data, along with information on age, family
size, income, and lifestyle is then compared to
purchase patterns of particular products (cars, food,
electronics, financial services) to develop market
segmentation profiles.
Researchers use these studies to identify two or
more segments within the market for a particular
company’s products
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Competition Analysis
Importance-performance analysis can be
used to evaluate competitors’ strategies,
strengths, limitations, and future plans
Attributes examined include price, product
performance, product quality, accuracy of
shipping and delivery, and convenience of
store location
Following the importance rankings,
researchers identify and evaluate competing
firms.
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Marketing Strategy Design
Information collected can be used to design
marketing strategy
Target market analysis
Positioning
New product planning
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Target Market Analysis
Identifies segments the company wishes to
serve as well as the needs of those groups
New product opportunities
Demographics, psychographics, attitudes
User profiles, usage patterns
Effectiveness of current strategy
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Positioning
Company seeks to establish perceptions of its
product offering that are consistent with
customer needs and preferences
Refers to perception of company versus
competition in mind of consumer
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
New Product Planning
Provides information for improving products
and planning new products
Concept and product testing
Test marketing
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Marketing Program Development
Gathers information for total marketing mix
Product portfolio analysis
Distribution decisions
Pricing decisions
Integrated marketing communications
(promotion decision)
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Product portfolio analysis
Gathers information for decision making
regarding
Reducing cost
altering marketing mixes
changing or deleting product lines
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Distribution decisions
Distributors and retailers that link producers
with end users
Brick-and-mortar retailers: trade area
analysis, store image studies, in-store
traffic patterns, and location analysis
Online stores: when a Web site is visited,
which of the products examined and
ultimately purchased, shopping cart
abandonment
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Price decision
pricing new products
modifying prices for existing products
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Situation analysis Strategy design Program development
Integrated marketing communications, or
Promotion decision
Support answering the question of how to
obtain optimum returns from promotional
budgets
accurately gauge the return on advertising
dollars spent
develop broadly acceptable metrics, then
collect the data for those metrics
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Sources of Ethical Dilemmas
Research provider
Research user
Respondents
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Ethical Challenges in Marketing Research
Rspondents
Source: Hair et al. (2010, p. 12) 1-