Overview
To help integrate what you are learning each week, as well as to help you illustrate your growing subject matter expertise, you'll complete a weekly blog-style post that focuses in some way on one or more of the topics covered that week. Each post must be a minimum of 100 words in length (including the post title) with no maximum limitation. They should be tailored to fit the personal/professional brand or expertise that you’re trying to develop. Note that this semester, you'll upload the 8 posts for this course to the WordPress website that you’ll develop in your E-Marketing course.
Your weekly application posts should go beyond merely reiterating what was covered in the course materials. They should show your target audience(s) how to apply marketing concepts, techniques, or technologies to real-world problems or opportunities for which they have an interest. Your posts can be serious, light-hearted, tell stories or experiences, give advice, offer critiques of marketing practices you encounter, make comparisons across companies or techniques, describe innovative marketing practices, predict the future of marketing, etc. The key is that they must be (1) informative to your target audience and (2) pertain in some way to the week's material for this course. Other than that, you have free reign. Remember that the tone, style, voice, and mood of your writing is up to you, but you should always consider what would work best for your target audiences. You may even decide to have a general theme to your posts, perhaps staying focused on a particular industry or region or marketplace.
Ideas for this week's Application Post
Below are some ideas of topics or areas that you could write about for this week's materials. Note that these are only prompts to get your creative juices flowing; you can use one of them or make up your own! You can write about one of the the main topics from one of this week's modules or just a small mention of something that sparked your curiosity (or anything in between). Remember, your post must be (1) informative to your target audience and (2) pertain in some way to the week's materials for this course.
- How can you use the “design with the end in mind concept” to form successful research plans? and – how can you apply this same concept to other aspects of your business?
- What types of research questions are better suited for qualitative vs. quantitative research?
DO NOT WRITE AS A STUDENT
Step 2 in the marketing research process
Design the Research Study
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Prof. Tanenbaum
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Step 2: design the research study
Determine the type of study that will best address your research question
Define your research audience
Develop the study instrument
Three Things You Need to Do
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Key success factors for research design
The most important things during the research design phase are:
Know your research question
Craft a research objective that will answer the research question
Have all the decision-makers and stakeholders pertinent to the study, review the research objective, and agree with the objective before proceeding
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The Research objective recipe
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Setting Good Research Objectives
Research tool
Research audience
Main idea of the research (the construct)
Types of questions to be asked
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Prof. Tanenbaum
Combine each of the 4 ingredients by filling in the blanks below.
Conduct a(n) ________ among ________ to learn about ________ as measured by ________.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Fitness tracker research objective
Conduct a pre/post survey among active exercisers between the ages 24-39 who exercise at least 30 minutes a day and who have not purchased a fitness tracker product in the past to learn about the effectiveness of our new-to-brand advertising campaign as measured by their awareness of and likelihood to purchase our fitness tracker product on a 7-pt scale, 3 months before and 3 months after the ad campaign launches.
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1. Determine the type of study that will best address your research question
Based on the research objective, you already know your study will be either:
Qualitative or quantitative
Therefore, your study will consist of quantitative surveys or qualitative focus groups, interviews, ethnographies, observations, or some combination
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2. Define your research audience
This is referred to as developing a sample plan, which consists of:
The types of people you want to include in your study
How many people of these people do you need to participate in the study
Keys questions to ask:
Who are the best people to answer the research question?
Are they current customers?
Are they potential customers in a new segment you are trying to reach?
Are they your competition’s customers, etc…?
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3. Develop the study instrument
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Primary qualitative tools
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Prof Tanenbaum
Qual vs. Quant refresher
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Today’s agenda
Primary Qualitative MR Tools
Customer Visits
Focus Groups
Interviews
Qualitative Data Analysis
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Customer visits
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4 Reasons to Visit Customers (in General)
Sell
As a salesperson, as part of a sales team, as a consultant, or to assist same
Tell
Product and project managers, executives: orient to firm’s strategy, explain initiatives
Fix
Engineers, assisting the field
Listen and learn …
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Benefits of the Customer Visit
Face-to-face communication
Complexity, novelty, ambiguity
Real-world setting (vs. the lab)
First-hand information
Vivid, credible
Utilization
Observation supplements conversation
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Preparing to Conduct customer visits
Choose the team
Set objectives
Select customers
Prepare visit teams
Develop discussion guide
Conduct the visit
Analyze the data and report the insights
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Customer visit Objectives
Start with a learning action verb
Good:
Identify, define, explore, generate, describe.
Bad:
Test, select, measure, track
Revisit the objective recipe card
Discuss as a team
Get buy-in
Does management actually want qualitative research–or expectations out of whack?
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Customer Selection
Select customer organizations to visit
Select job roles within the customer organization
Recruit customers
Match visit teams with customers
Remember:
Garbage in, garbage out
Bigger samples are better–but the law of diminishing returns does apply
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Use a Discussion Guide
Roadmap for the interview
Hierarchical organization of topics and sub-topics
Key questions plus probes/reminders
Remember, it’s a guide–not a script, checklist, or questionnaire
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Discussion Guide: Generic Example
Opening
Introductions
Key orienting questions (role, applications)
Current situation/issues
Changes in environment
Likes and dislikes
Desired future
Specific needs and desires
Underlying motivations
Reaction to concepts
Miscellaneous issues
Closing
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The Gold Standard for customer visit research
Ongoing customer visits (vs. ad hoc)
Travel to 12-30 customer sites with a few visits to each of the different customer types
Conducted by a cross-functional team of 2-3 people
With written objectives, discussion guide, and structured reporting process
Using an exploratory interview style focused more on customer issues than on product concerns
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Focus Groups
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Focus Groups
Small groups of people brought together to discuss a particular topic; guided by a moderator
The traditional all-purpose exploratory, qualitative research tool
Originated in the 1940s with sociologists working on WWII propaganda
Roots in marketing go back to the 1950s (motivation research)
FG have always had a certain cache
Today, best understood as one of several qualitative research options
Useful for B2C and B2B research
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Typical Focus Group Study
6-10 pre-screened consumers, meeting in a specially equipped room, for about 2 hours, with a professionally trained moderator
Clients able to observe behind a mirror; audio and video recording of groups (for later or remote viewing)
Moderator follows a discussion guide
Generally, 3-6 groups per market, per study
Report based on review of the video recordings, transcripts, and notes
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Focus Group Strengths
Get at lowest common denominator of customers
Unification dynamic
And … or … differentiate sub-groups of certain customers
Polarization dynamic
Third-party effect via professional moderator
Client participation
Rich customer insights coupled with vivid video and imagery
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Focus Group Weaknesses
Small, non-random samples
True of virtually all qualitative research
Dominant or shy participants, conformity and bandwagon effects
The downside of ‘group synergy’
Limited airtime per participant
Logistical issues
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Focus Group Research: Design Issues
Recruitment
Source of respondents?
Clients with good lists spend less
Recruitment from scratch is possible but difficult and expensive
Homogeneous or heterogeneous groups?
No easy answers. If sub-group differentiation is key, then some kinds of heterogeneity are helpful. However, heterogeneity that would inhibit interaction, rather than energize it, should be avoided
Homogeneity within groups, and heterogeneity across groups, is usually the solution
Screening variables must be selected
The goal is qualified respondents
Quotas as necessary
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Design Issues (cont’d)
Number of groups
Never just one
Two is risky
Three-four is standard
Six and eight are not uncommon
Generally some segmentation here
Number of respondents per group
6-10 people is typical
Smaller groups for experts
Over-recruitment generally essential
i.e., 12-14 confirmed to yield 8-10 attendees
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Design Issues (cont’d)
Discussion guide decisions
What topics to cover
How the discussion should flow
Key prompts
Whether stimuli or concepts will be presented
Moderator selection
Industry knowledge important or no?
Moderator and analyst the same person?
Company attendees
First hand experience is powerful
Edited videos can be useful
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Tips for Maximizing value of the Focus Groups
Sweat the screener and the phone screening
Goldilocks problem
Provide the moderator with high level input to the discussion guide
But leave the moderator free to construct and implement the actual working document
Pay attention behind the mirror … stay focused on the groups at hand
Gather verbatims
Edited videos can have high impact
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Remember: Focus Group Studies Are Not Survey Research
Details (and closed-ended questions) generally belong in surveys
Systematic inter-group comparisons belong to surveys
Thorough descriptions of individual viewpoints, judgments, actions, etc. belong to surveys (or customer visits/depth interviews)
Focus groups are for:
Surprises, epiphanies, insights (qualitative)
Challenges, social communication, revealing tacit assumptions (group)
Emotions, visceral reactions, top-of-mind responses (qualitative/group)
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Interviews
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Designing an Interview
A productive and valuable conversation with a customer doesn’t just happen—you have to prepare
But too much preparation produces an in-person survey questionnaire, rather than an interview
Practice makes perfect
Interviewing is a learned skill
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Question Selection
Start with your research objectives
Brainstorm
Keep the focus on open-ended, exploratory questions
Goal is to start a conversation, not shut it down
Stay focused on the customer
What they do, not what you offer
Problems they have, rather than needs they dream up
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Two Basic Types of Questions
Open-ended
Leave respondent free to answer in own terms
High probability of new learning
Minimal biasing effect
Closed-ended
Ask respondent to choose from a predefined set of answers–yes/no, multiple choice
Significant potential to shape answers
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Avoiding Bad Questions
Keep It Short and Simple (KISS)
Don’t lead the witness
Don’t reveal your biases
Minimize easy questions where the answer is cut and dry
Avoid questions that are too hard
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How to Conduct an Interview
This is an interview, not an interrogation
This is an interview, not a casual conversation
Let the customer do most of the talking
Interviewing is an art or craft, not a production process to be engineered
You don't have to be great; you just have to be not bad
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Two Keys to Effective Interviews
Rapport:
A relationship of trust, empathy, and understanding
Probing:
The diligent pursuit of fundamental, detailed, exhaustive information by means of persistent questioning
Failure to probe is the mistake made most often by beginning interviewers
What else? Why? Can you give me an example?
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Qualitative data analysis
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What is Qualitative data?
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Qualitative data is data that is related to opinions, attitudes, sentiment, and values.
Qualitative data is collected via:
Transcripts or recordings from individual interviews and focus groups
Researcher field notes or observations
Tasks conducted by the research participants (i.e. customer journey maps or journals)
Other video or audio recordings from the research project
Analyzing qualitative Data
Qualitative analysis is time intensive and requires objectivity
At the end of the project researchers will comb through the collected data, code it, and identify key themes
Typical qualitative research reports include:
Project objectives
Respondent summary (including some respondent pictures)
Discussion overview
Key themes
Selected respondent quotes
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Analyzing qualitative Data via content analysis
Content analysis is a means of quantifying qualitative data
Judges rate or count qualities in accordance with coding rules
Brand favorable or unfavorable comments
Attributes or problems referenced
Social or personal use of the product
Use of multiple judges allows calculation of reliability of judgments
Result is frequency counts that can be analyzed statistically
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Content analysis example
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