Inquiring Minds want to know - Case Study Example

It also has an acceptable margin of error for the survey was ± 4 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence The stratified disproportionate random sampling allows Penton to focus on the reply of the decision makers of which their ads were directed making the sampling a more accurate representation of the target market. It can also be relatively cost efficient because having 676 respondents as an accurate representative of the 1.7 million subscribers saves the company money in handling a huge population.

Above all, this guarantees that their intended market is well represented in the study. The other groups can also be subjected to another study which Penton no longer to spend to get representatives from said population. This however has a weakness of requiring more administrative effort and therefore time consuming and laborious because the huge population has to divided into 42 cells. 4. Describe the research design. Analyze its strengths and weaknesses. The method of getting the sample from a huge population of 1.

7 million domestic subscribers through stratified disproportionate random sampling may have an effective in getting the right respondents of their target market. The coverage of the research was also extensive covering 1992 with 648 ads and 1997 with 697 ads. The research design however defeated the efficacy of the sampling because it made a faulty comparison of these subgroups by the sheer gap in the years of comparison. They are measured by the same parameter of the number of leads generated by each ad but their circumstances were entirely different.

Thus, the result of increase from 3.3 in 1992 to 4.1 in 1997 is a suspect because the sample population in 1997 had more facility where potential customers can respond compared to 1992 whereby customer’s response was limited to traditional snail mail and perhaps telephone call where it can be tracked by cards to track inquiries from customers. Compared to 1997, there are more convenient through Information and Communication Technology options where customers can respond to the ads. They can conveniently send an email, go to the advertiser’s website and perhaps can chat in addition to traditional toll free call and fax.

Tracking is also convenient because it is done digitally compared to cards previously used. The availability of website address in 1997 was also 60.9 percent (3 out of 5) where they can email at 17.7 percent of ads compared to 1992 which were non-existent. Postal mailing address may be up in 19992 at 69 percent and only 55.5 percent in 1997 but this is almost irrelevant when customers can send an email. The base of the sampling population but the research design was able to get samples that decently represent the entire population.

When a survey was done, it had 710 completed questionnaires were received out of 1.7 million subscribers and 4,000 managers, executives, engineers, and purchasing agents selected from the U.S. Penton database. Of the 710 completed questionnaires, 676 respondents were decision makers indicating that the survey has indeed reached the right respondents. One of problem in quantifying the survey was also responses is weighed by their percentage mark up in the overall population. All other things being equal, this would have been an ideal method since it can accurately measure the increment or decrease of response to ad in relation to their representation from the overall population.

Except that the 1997 population had access to information