Understanding of Marketing as a Process - Essay Example

Design of Questionnaire that addresses the Research Objectives identified for the Hobbit's Choice Restaurant (Word count - 1881 excluding References) Introduction: American Marketing Association gives the definition of Marketing Research as 'the function which links consumer, and public to the market through information - information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues; designs the methods for collecting information; manages and implements the data collection process: analyses the results; and communicates the findings and their implications. (Marketing News, 1985). The Market Research Society of UK gives the definition as: 'the collection and analysis of data from a sample of individuals or organizations relating to their characteristics, behavior, attitudes, opinions or possessions. It includes all forms of marketing and social research such as consumer and industrial surveys, psychological investigations, observational and panel studies (MRS, 1994) Market Research covers all aspects of marketing of goods and services like Product Research, Sales Research, Price Research, Promotion research and Customer Research. The three major categories of research designs are 1) Exploratory, 2) Descriptive and 3) Causal, categorized according to the role they play in the marketing research process. 1. Exploratory Design: This is used to discover the general nature of a problem and variables associated with it. It helps in formulating of relevant hypotheses. This uses primary techniques like focus groups, in-depth interviews and observational studies and also uses secondary data, non-probability samples, case analysis and subjective analysis of the resultant data. They are generally qualitative in nature. 2. Descriptive Design: They focus on the accurate description of the variables under consideration. They use questionnaires and surveys. They are used for determining consumer profile and their product usage studies, price and attitude surveys, sales analysis, media research etc. They are quantitative in nature. 3. Causal Designs: They try to establish the nature of relationship between two or more variables under investigation. The direction of the Causal link is very important. The example of their uses may be measuring the effectiveness of advertisement in terms of sales or study of price elasticity of demand etc. Marketing Research Process: The Marketing Research Process can be divided in the following stages: 1. Define the Problem: The first and most crucial stage of the process is defining the problem and providing the necessary information to the Research team which will help them prepare a proper design plan. This stage helps the organization to assess its current position, to define its information needs and to prepare it to make informed decisions about its future. The information provided helps the market researchers with in-depth understanding of the situation. It is important for the market researcher to interview the staff commissioning the study and any other persons who can shed some light on the situation. This helps in forming the Market Research questions, which will lead to forming sub questions. The success of the research depends solely on understanding the problem and defining the questions and sub-questions for which answers are sought by the research. For our case of Hobbit's Choice the basic problem identified is the feasibility of a fine, upscale restaurant featuring the finest entrees, drinks, and desserts in an elegant atmosphere. 2. Decide Research Plan: At this stage the researchers decide in which category his research should fall into. In our case the Hobbit's choice, we have to first find out whether the research will fall into Qualitative or Quantitiative category. In Quantitative category the research is designed to elicit responses to pre-determined, standardized questions from a large number of respondents. This is basically collecting small amount of information from larger number of people. The data collected is then quantified in percentage and descriptive statistics and often statistically analyzed. In Qualitative category techniques are used at the preliminary stages of a research project to identify the basic factors affecting the management problem. This techniques try to uncover the underlying motivations behind consumers' opinions, attitudes, perceptions and behavior. This method is unstructured. These generally involve a small number of respondents. The main emphasis is on obtaining detailed information from a small group. The clientele of Hobbits' Choice should be good, fun-loving people whose lives primarily centered around eating. Hence respondents should be small in numbers, mainly financially affluent and who like luxuries in life. The research questions should be in-depth questions of their eating habits and their leisure life. Hence we have to use Qualitative Research Methods here. As we have seen earlier the exploratory research method deals with qualitative research hence we will go for exploratory research. Now we need to take one more decision at this stage, whether we should go for Primary or Secondary Research data or both Primary researches are those, which has not previously been carried out and involves collection of data for the specific purpose of a particular project. Secondary research are mainly concerned of using primary data mainly collected for some other project or use, Secondary model is mainly desktop kind of research, finding out relevant data from the available data. In our case we have to go for primary data system, as there is no previous research history of the kind or project we are looking for. At this stage we also have to get answer to the following questions: What should be the sampling plan and the procedures needs to be followed What are the methodologies should be used for data collection What kind of questionnaires needs to be prepared How the data should be analyzed and interpreted What techniques should be used for gathering the data 3. Data Collection: At this stage actual fieldwork is done like sending out postal questionnaires, running the focus group interview sessions, conduct the telephone survey etc. 4. Data Analysis and interpretation: At this stage the data collected are systemized in different forms. For example in qualitative data, they are typed in word processed documents as interview transcripts from audio or video taped conversation and then entered into computers using specific software applications like NUDIST - Non-numerical unstructured data indexing searching and theorizing, as rich text files and the analyzing. Quantitative data analysis, where data is mainly numeric the entry is done in mainly excel spreadsheet and the analysis is done by using statistical analysis packages like SPSS - Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Quantitative and Qualitative data so collected are analyses differently. The present trend is to use computers mainly for Quantitative data analysis, where data collection and analysis can be done simultaneously. Computer aided interview techniques using softwares like Computer-aided telephone interview (CATI) or Computer aided Personal Interview (CAPI) are used. At this stage validity and reliability of the data collected becomes an important issue. Various methods are used to determine the validity. 5. Report Preparation and Presentation: This is the final stage. It is very important that the results are presented effectively and free from bias. In most of the cases this information becomes the basic tool for the decision makers. The result should be precise, presented clearly and answer to the needs of the original proposer of the research. The report is the only physical evidence of the market research conducted. The process of design of Questionnaire: The questionnaire design is one of the most important aspects of Market Research because this is the vehicle by which the people will be interviewed. It is a tool to the process of data collection. There are four purposes of questionnaire: 1. The primary role of a questionnaire is to draw accurate information from the respondents. The emphasis should be on the word accurate. Accurate information only can be gathered from right persons by asking right questions. 2. It provides the structure to the interview to make the interview flow smoothly and orderly. It is important that all the respondents are asked same question in exactly similar way. The questionnaire provides the respondents a logical sequence to organize his thinking while responding. 3. It provides a standard format on which facts, comments and attitudes are recorded. The recording may be in the form of paper or audio or video recording. 4. It facilitates data processing. The format of questionnaire helps the data processing team to find the answers in logical order. The questionnaires are of three different types: 1. Structured: In structured questionnaires the questions are precisely worded and are sequenced in order. Most of the questions will have pre-defined answers. The respondents will have very less opportunity to deviate. This is mainly used for quantitative research models 2. Semi-structured: Here the laxity is given to a respondent to use predefined answer or to say whatever he/she wants. However the questions are asked in a similar way for every respondent. These are more flexible and are likely to be more probing to elicit reasons for certain answers. 3. Unstructured: Here the researchers use a checklist than a formal questionnaire on which the answers are written down. The interviewer is given sufficient latitude to sequence and format his/her questions and can decide at the time of interview depending on the type of respondent. Three different types of questions are used for structured and semi-structured questionnaires: 1. Behavioral: where factual information is sought on what the respondent is, does or own, the frequency with which certain actions are carried out. 2. Attitudinal: about what people think about something, their image and ratings of the things, the reasons why they do such things. 3. Classification: where information sought which can be used to group respondents to see how they differ from the other etc. The following are the fundamental principles of questionnaire design as suggested by Paul Hague in his book 'Questionnaire Design' 1. Think about the objective about the survey 2. Think about how the interview will be carried out 3. Think about the knowledge and interest of the respondent 4. Think about the introduction 5. Think about the order of the questions 6. Think about the type of questions 7. Think about the possible answers at the same time thinking about the questions 8. Think about how the data will be processed. Now I will prepare a questionnaire for Hobbits' Choice: As we have seen earlier, we have decided to use qualitative method. We have also decided to use explorative method. We can see that in this particular case as we will be interviewing affluent clients; a structured or semi structured questionnaire will not be useful. Unstructured questionnaire should be suitable. The objectives can be to find out the answer to the following questions for which we need to find answers: 1. The family background like no. of persons in the family, the income bracket. 2. The general leisure lifestyle like uses of club facilities or other leisure facilities; do they feel that there is lack of proper luxury eating-place around the area 3. Eating habits like no. of times the respondents eat out, what kind of atmosphere they look for while eating out 4. What are the facilities they feel the present restaurants lack The above questionnaire will give the following result: 1. Approximate clientele available in the area where research is conducted. 2. The eating preferences of the respondents 3. The necessity felt by the respondents for a restaurant like Hobbits' Choice. 4. The ambient and other facilities the respondents will be looking for from a restaurant like Hobbits' Choice. References Baines Paul & Chansarkar Bal, Introducing Marketing Research, John wiley & Sons Ltd, West Sussex Hague Paul, Questionnaire Design, The Market Research Series. (1993) Kogan Page, London Read More