The Marketing Research Process Mark Rosenbaum,Ph.D.

University of Hawaii

The Marketing Research Process: 11 Steps

Step One: Step Two: Step Three: Step Four: Step Five:

Step Six:

Establishing the Need for Marketing Research Defining the Problem Establishing Research Objectives Determining Research Design Identifying Information Types and Sources Determining Methods of Accessing Data

The Marketing Research Process: 11 Steps cont

Step Seven: Step Eight: Step Nine: Step Ten: Step Eleven:

Designing Data Collection Forms Determining Sample Plan and Size Collecting Data Analyzing Data Preparing and Presenting the Final Research Report

The Marketing Research Process

Step One: Establish the Need for Marketing Research

When Marketing Research is not needed The information is already available Decisions need to be made now You cant afford research Costs outweigh the value of the research

The Marketing Research Process

Step Two: Define the Problem

The most important step in the marketing research process is defining the problem. What is your teams problem?

The Marketing Research Process

Step Three: Establish Research Objectives

What information is needed in order to solve the problem? Primary Secondary Both

The Marketing Research Process

Step Four: Determine Research Design

Exploratory Research: collecting information in an unstructured and informal manner Descriptive Research: refers to a set of methods and procedures describing marketing variables Causal Research (experiments and other approaches): allows isolation of causes and effects via use of experiment or surveys.

The Marketing Research Process

Step Five: Identify Information Types and Sources

Secondary Data: information that has been collected for some other purpose other than the research at hand Primary Data: information that has been gathered specifically for the research objectives at hand

Sites that you should use

School or University of Hawaii Library

http://www.hawaii.edu/emailref/business/mktg.htm#jou Lexis-Nexis: Must show industry data

Demographic Info:

http://www.census.gov/ More specific: http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_sse=on http://www.census.gov/census2000/states/hi.html

Other sites
Claritas

http://www.clusterbigip1.claritas.com/claritas/Default.j You are your zip code

Reference USA
Only available at University of Hawaii at Manoa

The goal:
Present facts and figures in your marketing plans.

The Marketing Research Process

Step Six: Determine Methods of Accessing Data

Secondary Data: accessing data through sources such as the Internet and library Primary Data: collecting data through methods such as telephone, mail, online, and face-to-face (quantitative) and observation studies and focus groups (qualitative) Both are excellent! Use both in your projects!

The Marketing Research Process

Step Seven: Design Data Collection Forms

The design of the data collection form that is used to ask or observe and record information in marketing research projects is critical to the success of the project. It is easy to write a set of questions but very difficult to construct a questionnaire. Questionnaires Observation Studies

The Marketing Research Process

Step Eight: Determine Sample Plan and Size

Sample plan: refers to the process used to select units from the population to be included in the sample Sample size: refers to determining how many elements of the population should be included in the sample

The Marketing Research Process

Step Nine: Collect Data

Data collection is very important because, regardless of the data analysis methods used, data analysis cannot fix bad data. 12 Nonsampling errors may occur during data collection. These are related to poor design and/or execution of the data gathering. Sampling errors may occur based purely on chance Trying to make a decision on a population from a sample

The Marketing Research Process

Step Ten: Analyze Data

Data analysis: involves entering data into computer files, inspecting data for errors, and running tabulations and various statistical tests Data cleaning: process by which raw data are checked to verify that the data have been correctly input from the data collection form to the computer software program

The Marketing Research Process

Step Eleven: Prepare and Present the Final Research Report

The last step is one of the most important phases of marketing research. Its importance cannot be overstated because it is the report, or its presentation, that properly communicates the results to the client.

Interpreting the Data

Provide Frequencies and Descriptives for each variable.
Provide Frequencies for all Provide mean & standard deviation for interval and ratio variables

Crosstabulation
Is there a significant difference between an independent variable (nominal/ordinal) and the response to a dependent variable (nom/ord)? What were asking is are the proportions the same? The dependent variable is your variable of interest.

It looks like this.

Dependent Variable

Independent Variable

The results
Hawaiian Pineapples * country of origin Crosstabulation country of origin China/South Japan Korea 316 74 92.7% 69.8% 25 32 7.3% 30.2% 341 106 100.0% 100.0%

Chi-Square Tests
Hawaiian Pineapples No Yes Total Count % within country of origin Count % within country of origin Count % within country of origin

USA/Canada 328 62.6% 196 37.4% 524 100.0%

All other 48 63.2% 28 36.8% 76 100.0%

Total 766 73.2% 281 26.8% 1047 100.0%

Chi-Square Tests Value 100.357a 116.519 7.870 1047 df 3 3 1 Asymp. Sig. (2-sided) .000 .000 .005

Pearson Chi-Square Likelihood Ratio Linear-by-Linear Association N of Valid Cases

a. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 20.40.

For additional statistics

If you have a dependent variable that is interval or ratio, you must perform an analysis of variance. Dependent variable is nominal or ordinal.