Potential Boundaries and Limitations Within Market Research

There are many potential boundaries and limitations that can cause problems to market research.  One is the research not always being accurate.  Every time someone surveys a group of people the information they collect will never be the same.  This can be challenging to gage what to change within a company’s marketing strategy.  Another limitation that goes along with this is the behavior of humans is never predictable.  People will always surprise you with responses and challenge you and the companies marketing strategy.  Another limitation is that people interoperate things differently.  This meaning if you are doing market research with a group of people, you and the other people you are conducting research with may not agree with your opinion due to the way they interoperate the data collected.  For instance, if you have data collected that says 80% of doctors recommend a certain medicine and you only surveyed 10 doctors, you may want to use this data in a campaign, but your marketing team may not want to use this because they feel an 80% average when only 10 doctors involved is not strong enough information to display.  Another big issue is bias.  Although everyone who conducts market research tries so hard not to have bias in their research, sometimes they accidently run in to it.  This is because when they are writing their questions they might accidentally write leading questions or position questions in a specific order to get the responses they are expecting to get.

 

I personally believe that my market research group must be aware of all these potential limitations that could hurt our research.  I think this because all of these are able to happen easily if one is not paying attention.  I think the big limitations we need to keep the strongest eye on is bias and how we interpret the information.  I think this because these are the limitations we can strongly control.  We will also need to keep an eye on realizing that all the data we collect will not be the same and that people will surprise up with answers that we will not expect.  We as a group just need to understand and accept this because these are limitation that we cannot control, we will just need to analyze our information more if this happens.  I believe with these limitations in front of us, our group will still be able to collect efficient qualitative or quantitative research in order to help out the Clothes Closet.

By Morgan Kelley

The Truth About Surveys

In Today’s age, the customer’s stance on a brand, whether positive or negative, is more powerful than a survey that describes a customer’s characteristics and behaviors. There are several reasons for this. One reason is many people do not put the time and effort into completing a survey. This meaning a person will either not fill the survey out, or they do not put as much effort and thought into their answers as they should on the survey. Another reason for this is due to brand loyalty. People already have their minds made up on different brands by the quality, the experience and image of a company through its brand. This meaning that a person who may strongly dislike a certain brand could give that company all negative marks when it does not deserve all negative marks. With this being said, surveys do not always provide accurate answers among everyone who partakes in the survey.

There are many examples that describe that surveys are not always as powerful as a customer stance on a brand. A personal example I have of this is when I take my college class evaluation surveys that involve me evaluating my professors. When I have a professor that I like, the way I fill out the class survey ratings is not too accurate. The reason I say it is not too accurate is because I will go down the list of descriptive items to rate for that particular professor I like, and I will hardly read the description of the rating, instead I will give them the top rating. I do this because I like the professor so I want to make sure that it displays that they are a good professor. This is related to brand loyalty as if it were a product or service. If a person like something whether it is a product or service they would do the same thing because they like it.  With this being said, people want to show that they like a certain brand or product so rather than taking the time to read and understand the survey, they will just put the top marks without reading the rating description information. People who do this may think that they are helping the company out that they like, but in all reality, it is not helping the company because it’s not providing a fully accurate answer.  This is because there may be something that they dislike a bit, but they never took the time to read the complete survey rating description so “that thing” that they may dislike will not show up in their survey answer results.

By Morgan Kelley

 

 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is a great way for companies to understand and learn about their customers and how these customers affect their company’s growth and sales.  This researches main purpose is to get an understanding of the reasons customers make certain decisions and the thought process that goes into these decisions.   This research is also a great tool for companies to use because it provides an understanding of why certain problem are happening for the company and through this, it can help a company develop and implement ideas to help their current problem or issue within the company vanish.

Although qualitative research sounds like it can help a company out a lot it does come with some implications. One implication is bias among interviewers. This is because if an interview is bias towards one brand and has no background knowledge of any other brand then it can create bias within their answers. To help counteract this problem the company involved in the interview can follow up with survey research.  Another implication that can comes from qualitative research is the instability and imprecision consequence due to having small sample sizes. As I focus group should be between 8 to 10 people it is hard to get an accurate reading from these selected people concerning an entire company.  In a focus group, the best way qualitative research is helpful for a company is to find out what customers find negative about the company or product so that area can be improved.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=L8nSK5QEeGEC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Qualitative+marketing+Research+journals&ots=I-lsjzfruM&sig=WJTbzF2oyMIBsHgVcDoEKLJ7E7U#v=onepage&q=Qualitative%20marketing%20Research%20journals&f=false

The link above has an article about qualitative research and the impact it has.  This article discusses the benefits of companies performing qualitative research along with the negative effects. One of the main positive affects this article discussed was that qualitative research can help a company discover where it needs to improve, and what its customers are thinking from their purchase decision. One of the negative affects this article talked about is that I can be costly depending on how a company goes about their research.

All in all, I believe qualitative research is a great way for a company to learn and discover what their customers are looking for and want, along with figuring out what a company need to change to make their product or service more appealing. I think this kind of research is very interesting because it is the psychology behind why a customer does one thing over another.

By Morgan Kelley

Conducting Focus Groups

I thought this video was very helpful and provided me many tips on focus groups.  I would of never through of the majority of these ideas, especially the ones when you involve the participants together like the role-playing tip.  I believe this video was great to watch and if I conduct a focus group in the future I will be sure to watch this video to refer to the tips for a refresher.  Here are some things I learning while watching this video.

There are different steps that go into a focus group.  The first step is the set up.  To do this the moderator must arrive early to make sure set up is good, set mics up, provide lunches, have name tags for the participants.  In addition to the they needed to do research on the people who will be at this focus group to figure out which participants are more dominate and outgoing individuals so that they can be seated closer to the moderator.  The next step is the participants arrive-.  During this that moderator needs to make the participants feel welcomed, such as letting them know that you have food for them and show them their seats.  Lastly the focus group begins. The start of the focus group called the introduction is short and has 4 parts to it.  These parts are, the welcome and introduction, the background on the topic, the ground rules, and the opening question.

Tips

-use a short pause, around 5 second, while being the moderator because it allows participants to reflect, relax and think about their thoughts.

-What to do when you have a person rambling: try to give the rambler hints that they are talking too much, such as stop writing what they are saying, or look down.  If they still are not getting the hint, then redirect the question to a different participant.

-Get participants to talk: look at these individuals, call on them and invite them into the conversation

-Role play: effective when trying to get people to talk about a complex idea that is best described by acting it out.  Once role play is over ask the other participants to reflect on the role play presented.  This provided what participants though of the role play and what they would do in that particular situation

-Using lists: pass out a card to participants and then have them write down several things and then the moderator takes these lists and makes a larger list on a flip chart.  Once the larger list is complete for all to see, participants are then asked to pick out what things listed on the big list are the most important

-Rating sheet: pass out a sheet of paper with a list of items for participants to rate that are related to the topic.  Once they do this the mediator will take all the participants rankings and put them together on a display for all to see.

Ways to get rapid feedback:

-show of fingers:  mediator ask participants a question about how often they do something and participants show how often by how many fingers they hold up.  This concept leads the moderato into the conclusion as to why something might be occurring.

-thumbs up or down:  moderator asks a question about agreeing or not agreeing and ask for their answer to be in the form of a thumb position.  Thumb up meaning they agree and thumb down meaning they do not agree.

-projection:  put animals or objects in place of the topic.

Concluding the focus group starts off by the moderator asking each participant to reflect on the discussion and what was the most important things they talked about in the conversation.  The moderate will invite the assistant moderator into the decision to follow up on any important questions and to give a very short summary of what has been discussed during the focus group.  Once the summery is complete they will ask participants if they heard and understood everything correctly.

The Crazy World of Big Data

This past week in my market research and strategies class we watched a documentary called “Big Data”.  This documentary was about how much technology has progressed over the years.  The progress of technology has been an amazing thing for collecting all sorts of data.  Watching this documentary, I learned a lot.  I first learned that everything we all do online leaves a digital trace.  This is something I’m sure we hear a lot, but from watching this documentary I can insure you that everything we all do truly does leave a trace.  The amount of data that is getting collected about each and every one of us is outstanding and it is predicted that in 2020 there will be 4 zettabyte of big data collected about all of us that will be online.  This data allows us to see patterns and trends to formulate questions and answers.

So much can be learned from big data if it is utilized correctly.  For instance, in this documentary researchers were able to follow trends while doing additional research to predict when the flu was going to occur weeks before it actually occurred.  Researchers were also able to predict what words babies will be able to grasp and say first.  In addition to this, this universally available data along with research has been able to detect when a premature baby may develop infections, since they are prone to infection due to them being born quite early.  I think this is really amazing, especially because I am a twin and my twin sister and I were premature babies and had some complications at birth.  Luckily, we survived our complications, but many babies struggle to survive so this data and research can literally save many life’s.

Another thing advanced technology has given us the ability to do, is track our daily activities.  Many people do this all the time.  A good example of this would be the Fitbit.  In this documentary, Target did a little tracking.  They decided to track pregnant women’s purchases to see what they were buying when they were pregnant.  They tracked this for a while so that they could eventually figure out what pregnant women were buying so that they could send them coupons.  They ended up sending coupons for baby supplies to an 18 year old and this 18 year old’s father found out.  This 18 year old’s father was not happy about this and went to his local Target and talked to the manager about this.  The manager had no idea that corporate Target was tracking pregnant women’s purchases, but apologized to the father.  A few days’ latter the Target manager felt really bad about the 18 year old getting coupons for baby supplies so he decided to call the father back again and apologize.  When the manager was on the phone apologizing to the father, the father stopped the manager and began to say, I want to apologize to you, it turns out that my 18 year old daughter is pregnant and I just found out.  This shows that the tracking of anything can be very useful in many kinds of ways.
Throughout this documentary, I learned a lot but I was also able to relate to many things.  For instance, during my summer internship I worked with google analytics.  Working with this was extremely interesting because I could see the location of everyone who clicked on the company’s page and how long they were on the different pages on the company’s website.  To go along with this, during my internship I also had to create LinkedIn and Twitter advertisements.  While I was creating these advertisements, it was really interesting how I could target certain people.  The company I worked for was a company that sells retention software for colleges.  I was able to pick a certain state and or region and then pick the universities I wanted to target.  If this doesn’t cut my demographics down enough I was also able to cut them down by what their specific job title are; so I could target all the VP’s of academic affairs.  This really opened my eyes up to how detailed marketers can get into targeting a specific group.

Watching this documentary made it clear that everything a person does is constantly being tracked.  All of their social media is being tracked.  They think these social media sites are free, but they really aren’t because the social media sites, like Facebook, sell the information we all post.  In addition to this, all the music we listen to is tracked.  To make things a little more creepy, all of our text messages are tracked.  When we send a text message our location is recorded along with the message by our phone company.

We are currently living in a world where we have lost our privacy because the government is constantly collecting it all.  The concern many have is, what happens when all this information gets hacked and someone else has their hands on this?  On one hand, many people are infatuated by all the growing technology and data collection and then on the other hand many people are concerned for the future and what it holds.  Are we eventually going to have no privacy at all, or will there be a line that is drawn soon?

 

Useful Databases for Market Research

Today in my market research and strategy class I learned about different databases to help do market research.  The first database I learned about is called Communication Source.  This database is a bit different from what I am use to.  This is because it is a much smaller database.  This meaning there are not as many articles within the database which can be nice so when I search something I am not given 50,000+ articles to search from, on the same topic.  This site will provide around 50 articles with a search, which is a much better amount to search through.  In addition to this you can also limit your search by source types.  This database also provides abstracts so you can read that to get an understanding what a complete article is about and then make the decision to investigate it and read it or to navigate away from it because it’s not relevant to your area of research.  Lastly, what I learned about Communication Source is that it cites all the articles in APA format, but I have to be careful because the formatting usually has capitalization issues.

The second database I learned about is called Stage Premiere Journals.  This is a neat database because all the articles composed in this database are academic journals.  This database enables the ability to browse journals by discipline.  It also provides abstracts which is helpful as I explained above.  The really awesome feature about this database is it has a button that you can click that finds related articles to your topic that you are currently researching.  Lastly, Stage Premiere Journals allows you to combine search terms so that your search is more narrow and specific to cut down on the amount of articles your search will bring up.

Mintel is the third database I learned about.  This database is strictly a market research database.  I have used this site in the past in my entrepreneurship class and this site is really beneficial.  It enables you to get demographic information on different populations.  That is what I used it for in my entrepreneurship class.  But today I learned more about it and I learned that you can get company information from it.  You can see what a company does to keep their business afloat, whether it be their promotions, pricing, or anything else you can think of.

Learning about the database Statista was very interesting.  This database is mainly statistics.  It displays information from the market place as well as people’s opinions; so, you will have to be a little careful when it comes to the sources that are people’s opinions.  Other than that, this database is extremely beneficial because it can help provide raw data behind you reasoning.

The last database I learned about in class was BrowZine.  This database is a really useful database because it provides so many different kinds of sources.  In attrition to this it has a bookshelf feature.  This feature allows you to save articles, journals, book or any other kind of source and come back to it at a later time to look at it.

Today’s class was very beneficial to me because it opened up my eyes to all the different databases that are going to be useful to me for my market research project.  I’m excited to begin my research and am wondering which database I will find to be the most useful.

Getting to know me

Hello, I’m Morgan and I am a senior marketing major at West Virginia Wesleyan College who is also a college athlete that plays lacrosse.  I have created this blog for my marketing research class.  For my first blog post I wanted to tell you a little about myself, so here it goes!

This past fall I studied abroad in Dublin Ireland and it was amazing; it was so much more than I expected.  The reason I chose Dublin to study in was because that city is very big into music and I want to get into the music industry to promote artists.  Going to Ireland provided me the opportunity to do so many things that I never thought I would be able to do.  I going involved in my school radio and had a weekly broadcast.  In addition to this I created my own concert consisting of 3 bands where all the proceeds went to the Temple Street Children’s Hospital.  I had to get the venue, get the bands, and promote the event all within 26 days.  This was extremely hard and stressful to do, but I loved every single second of it.  This made me realize that my dream to get into the music industry is what I have to fight for!  Lastly, I was able to interview an up and coming singer songwriter, Tim Chadwick, from Dublin Ireland.  It was such an exciting to interview a singer songwriter.  The interview I did with Tim Chadwick is all over the internet, on YouTube (part 1 link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIpqSTme4io&t=6s  AND part 2 link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNPZzQpgSLU), and SoundCloud (here’s the link- https://soundcloud.com/user-454568910/interview-with-singer-songwriter-tim-chadwick).  I believe this was the highlight of my study abroad experience!

Now let’s flashback even further than fall, lest flashback to summer.  Over the summer, I had an amazing summer internship with a new and growing company, Aviso Coaching.  This company was small enough that their sales people were also doing the marketing for the company, that is until I got hired.  With this being said, I was able to have my handed in a lot of different things, that I don’t believe a normal marketing intern would have had the opportunity to do.  I did lots and lots of market research, I revamped the company’s language on the website so that the google robots were picking up exactly what the company is truly about, I worked with google analytics, I attended sales and marketing meeting, I helped with picking out new images to add to the companies, and I even did some coding.  With this being said, I had the opportunity to learn and do so much.  This was literally the best internship I could have got, so I’m truly fortunate that I ended up interning for Aviso Coaching.

First blog post

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.