Marketing Research Series
Bonnie Feigenbaum is a Senior PR Consultant with TNKR Media, former Town Councillor and Chief of Staff to a Federal MP. She has almost 30 years of teaching experience, creating, and delivering courses at five post-secondary institutions, including McGill’s Desautels School of Management. She is a bilingual, marketing and communications professional with 15 years of participation in local politics and almost 40 years of community involvement.
Through Bonnidée Services, her own boutique communications company, she has been responsible for all aspects of the strategic plan for a wide range of clients, specializing in government relations and stakeholder management.
Her teaching philosophy, EDU-TAINMENT, is rooted in flexibility and adaptability using a three-pronged approach of presentation, practicality, and participation to integrate real-life experiences in marketing, communications, politics, and business to create a dynamic environment within a theoretical base.
1. Introduction
In this lecture, I will be giving you an overview of marketing research. We will begin with the definition of marketing research, highlight the importance of marketing research to management to be able to understand the ever-changing marketplace. We will link this “need to know” to the need for the marketing researcher to take a proactive role in the company and discuss many of the uses of marketing research.
2. The Research Process
To create effective marketing strategies that connect with your target, leveraging the opportunities in your industry which utilize your company’s strengths most effectively, you must first understand the environment in which marketing operates. In this lecture, I will present an overview of the entire marketing research process; problem definition, research design, sampling, collecting, analyzing the data and finally, presenting the report. I will also discuss all the components for creating a research request and a request for proposal.
3. Secondary Data Collection and Marketing Analytics
Explaining how we use the secondary data to develop marketing research proposals will be the focus of this lecture. All the types of secondary data collection methods will be overviewed as well as discussing how Big Data breakthrough and marketing analytics are moving to the forefront and modifying the research process.
4. Qualitative Research
In this lecture, we delve into them anyways we can get into insights into the consumers buying process through qualitative research. we will go over the uses of qualitative research the limitations and spend a good part of the discussion on the most popular method, focus groups.
5. Observations and Experimental Research
In this lecture we will focus on the first two of the three primary data collection methods observation and experimentation. Starting with observation, we will discuss the various approaches to observation research and its advantages and disadvantages. I will also go over human observation and the relatively new method of ethnographic research. Many of the methods of machine observation including tracking and virtual reality an augmented reality marketing research will be featured. The experimental research section will define experimental research and discuss test markets.
6. Survey Research
The third and final method of primary data collection is traditional survey research. I will discuss why decision makers like survey research, the diverse types of survey available, how to determine which survey method to use, and the types of errors that can occur in survey research and how to avoid them.
7. Questionnaire Design
In discussing questionnaire design, we will first go over the role of the questionnaire and the criteria for a good questionnaire. I will review the questionnaire design process, coding and measurement process. We will then discuss how to build the answers of the questionnaire the levels of measurement the attitude measurement scales and the considerations when selecting a scale. In this way you will be able to design an effective questionnaire that can give you insightful answers to your marketing problems.
8. Sampling Issues
Here we will start with the concept of sampling. We will then go over developing a sampling plan, discuss sampling and non-sampling errors, probability and nonprobability sampling methods and how to determine a sample size.
9. Introduction To Data Analysis
This will be an introduction to data processing and basic data analysis, starting with an overview of data analysis procedure for survey research some descriptive statistics and the use of cross tabulations.
10. Marketing Research Reports
In our final lecture, we will put it all together and review all the concepts as we go through all the elements of the full marketing research report. We will review the marketing wish research department functions including how to prepare the report. How to and the importance of creating a professionally written focused report and supportive clear presentation will also be discussed.