An informal gathering of background information about the environment in which your business operates should help in that regard. Symptoms can be confusing; you may be so caught up in them that you do not recognize the disease! Good marketing research can help you structure and understand the true problem. Consider the following example. A new cell phone with basic computing and Internet capabilities is selling poorly.
Distributors claim competitors' lower prices for similar products are causing poor sales. Based on the distributors' beliefs, the company conducts a detailed analysis of competitors' products, attending especially to pricing. Determine the unit of analysis. Depending on the research problem, the appropriate unit of analysis could be persons, households, spouses, or organizations. Without identifying the appropriate unit of analysis, you cannot draw a suitable sample or perform suitable data analyses.
In consumption studies, for example, households rather than persons are the appropriate unit of analysis. Marketers who do not understand those processes are flying blind in their efforts to provide the best possible product. Determine relevant things to ask about. Although you may want to learn about non-quantifiable matters, relevant issues typically are quantifiable. In essence, this step of the process entails determining what to measure and how to measure it.
Your dependent and independent variables determine the focus of your study, especially in forecasting contexts. As the words denote, the dependent variable depends on one or more independent variables. For example, realtors can predict home-buying behavior during the next quarter or the next year by looking at factors relating to future home-buying behavior, such as growth in disposable income, growth in investment income, and consumer sentiment. Translate the marketing problem into researchable objectives.
Because researchers must create researchable objectives concordant with their problem definition, often they want to express those objectives in the most rigorous terms—something called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a formal, testable statement refutable by empirical data. Whereas you may have a hunch about your customers, a hypothesis about your customers is a formal statement of that hunch testable by marketing research. To generate one or more hypotheses for formal testing, start with a purpose, which helps generate research questions answerable by exploratory research, your experience, and basic marketing theory.
Exploratory research often is a necessary prelude to developing hypotheses. Types of exploratory research include reviewing secondary data, conducting pilot studies, doing in-depth interviews with people who have requisite experience, and implementing case studies. Turning Problems into Objectives: Examples Marketing problem 1: Should a brick-and-mortar women's clothing retailer create an Internet shopping site? Marketing problem 2: Which group of potential customers should this clothing retailer target?
Stage 2: Designing the Study The research design is the master plan for the research that follows. This stage specifies the methods you or the researcher will use to conduct the study. You must decide the questions needing answers and whether those answers can be provided by some combination of surveys, experi- ments, or analyses of secondary data.
If you are uncertain about those questions, preliminary exploratory research may be necessary. If you conduct a survey, then your initial design issues relate to your questionnaire and data collection method, which are intertwined. If secondary data are needed—for example, to conduct a site location analysis—how timely and compatible are existing sources?
In essence, are the available data a square peg you are trying to stuff into the round hole of your research needs? If you conduct an experiment, then you must ensure a proper design with tight controls; otherwise, you cannot know if your results are bogus or reflect the conditions to which you exposed participants. Often, people are unaware of their reasons for doing things or are incapable of responding meaningfully to questions about their attitudes and behaviors.
When these issues arise, asking people directly will not work. Alternatively, you may use observation to answer your research questions indirectly. You must decide how quickly your research study must be completed. Marketing research can be relatively accurate, relatively fast, and relatively inexpensive, but it can only be two of those three simultaneously. If you needed to know yesterday, then the expense for a study of sufficient quality increases markedly.
Thus, the survey data collection method you choose depends on the number of questions you need to ask. For example, a survey about features for ebook readers administered to people who have never used such devices is unlikely to produce accurate forecasts of future reader purchases.
If an experiment is needed, what treatment or condition will the researcher test? In what circumstance will you place one group of people and how will you compare their responses to the responses of a different group of people placed in a different circumstance? For example, if you want to identify the most effective among several print ads you might run in a local newspaper, how will you expose people to those ads? You want people to respond naturally to these ads, yet to show them only the ads and then ask them what they think is an artificial task likely to produce untrustworthy results.
Stage 3: Selecting a Sample If you have only 25 customers to whom you might offer a new service, you can afford to survey all of them. However, if you have , customers, surveying all of them is neither cost effective nor necessary.
Instead, you can select a representative sample to ask about this possible new service. If the population is small and reasonably accessible, then you can query every person in the population, in which case you are taking a census rather than drawing a sample. A scientific sample—one you can comfortably generalize to the group s you want to query— requires drawing respondents from a representative list or sample frame.
Underestimation or overestimation is a common problem. Despite these limitations, this study demonstrates that passing along vWOM occurs through a persuasive and cognitive process. References Allsop, D. Alon, A. Arndt, J. Beam, M. Bobkowski, P. Bulmer, M. Chahal, H. Chevalier, J. Choi, J. Cohen, D. Cohen, J. Cummings, C. Davison, W. Dichter, E.
November-December, pp. Dutta-Bergman, M. Eagly, A. Eisend, M. Gangadharbatla, H. Hansen, S. Hennig-Thurau, T. Herr, P. Hicks, A. Hoorens, V. Hsu, M. Hu, X. Jin, S. Kelman, H. Kietzmann, J. Kim, H. Kozinets, R. Lafferty, B. LaRose, R. Lawrence, B. Lee, C. Lee, S. Leino, J. Leung, L. Lim, Y. Lin, T.
Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. Litvin, S. Mahapatra, S. Men, L. Moy, P. Mun, Y. Munzel, A. Kunz, W. Noguti, V. Park, S. Rathore, S. Refuel Agency Roger, E. Rubin, A. Shade, D. Shen, L. Sundaram, D. Teng, S. Tian, Y. Weeks, B. Yzer, M. Further reading Yeh, Y. Corresponding author Nicky Chang Bi can be contacted at: cbi bgsu.
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Explore Magazines. Editors' Picks All magazines. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Explore Documents. Uploaded by Teodora. Document Information click to expand document information Original Title aab7a49a2a66df2a9ab4ef9faf76c. Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. Perceived quality can also be seen as the quality perception of consumers comparing a products quality or superiority of the product or service with respect to its intended purpose, relative to alternative.
A products performance, features, reliability, durability, serviceability are some factors that influence its perceived quality. Perceived quality is regarded as a core Customer-Based Brand Equity construct because of its association with the willingness to pay a price premium, intention to purchase a brand and choice of brand Netemeyer et. Brand equity is positively related to perceived quality but that a high perceived quality does not necessarily mean high brand equity Yoo, et al, Brand loyalty: Creativity, building and maintaining brand loyalty has been an important issue for most marketers in establishing sustainable competitive advantage.
Brand loyalty, a reflection of brand equity refers to the tendency to be committed to a focal brand demonstrated through the intention of purchasing that brand as a primary choice Oliver, Routine purchase of a brand without switching to other brand is referred to as brand loyalty.
This brand equity dimension is composed of two different components; attitudinal which includes cognitive, affective and behavioral intent dimensions and behavioral repeat buying behavior Dick and Bass, , Taylor et. This dimension plays an outstanding role in creating brand equity. Aaker, ; Grover and Srinivasan, There are different levels of brand loyalty. Trust plays a vital role in augmenting both behavioral and attitudinal loyalty which makes consumers purchase a brand routinely and resist switching to another brand.
Developing the right items to measure these three significant dimensions, the brand equity of a product can be well captured. We begin by reviewing Yoo, Donthu and Lee paper, where they researched into how marketing activities can increase and decrease brand equity.
They employed perceived quality, brand loyalty and brand awareness with strong associations as common dimensions of brand equity in their research.
They suggest by strengthening the dimensions of brand equity, brand equity can be created maintained, and expanded. Villajero and Sanchez-Franco also agree with Yoo et al. Data from respondents for twelve brands covering three product categories athletic shoes, camera film, and color television were collected. Structural equation model was used to estimate the parameters of their model.
In their SEM results, brand equity was positively related to perceived quality, brand loyalty and brand associations with awareness. Yoo, Donthu and Lee analysis revealed that there are two types of marketing managerial effort; brand building high advertising, high price, high distribution through retailers with good store image and brand harming frequent use of price promotion.
They presented some limitations of their research but the prominent one is looking at the interaction among the marketing efforts and how they affect the brand equity through the dimensions. Using the same product category in their previous paper Yoo et. The researchers analyzed data from a total of eligible responses Koreans, Korean Americans and Americans on three levels: an individual analysis to determine common items across samples ; a multi-group analysis to examine factorial invariance; and an individual-level multicultural factor analysis pooled analysis.
Reliability analysis were significant in all four brand dimensions Aaker, however, exploratory factor analysis resulted in three dimensions because of the inseparability of brand awareness and brand association. The three-dimension model was then used for the multi group analysis then followed by the pooled analysis. Results from the pooled failed to produce the expected four dimensions of brand equity due to lack of discriminant validity between brand awareness and associations.
Table 1: Intercorrelations among Brand dimensions Source: B. Yoo and N. Donthu , pg 8 To buttress the three-model dimension, Washburn and Plank paper was examined. The reason for selecting this paper is to demonstrate that other product categories apart from what Yoo et. Their analysis examined consumer-based brand equity in the context of co-branded products and focused on the brand equity scale and its properties, not on the effects of co-branding.
Due to this purpose, they utilized the same scales as Yoo and Donthu , questions used were identical but were evaluated on a seven point rather than the five —point response scale employed by Yoo and Donthu.
Furthermore, Gil et. Their analysis was divided into three sections: effects of the information provided by both family and firm through its marketing actions they selected advertising, price and promotion ; relationships between dimensions of brand equity; and the relationship between each dimension and overall brand equity. Random data were gathered from young adults aged between 18 and 35 years from a major city in Spain for their empirical work.
The highest and lowest brands familiar to the sample in the three product categories olive oil, toothpaste and milk were selected and used in their research. The reliability and dimensionality of the scales were tested and results were above the values generally accepted. This was followed by confirmatory analysis of the scales through the EQS software to study convergent and discriminant validity.
Regarding convergent validity criteria, items with factor loadings below 0. However discriminant validity results for awareness and associations intervals contained the value 1. They considered two alternatives; joint dimension and establishing a second order structure. Results indicated that joint dimension of brand awareness and brand association, on the whole had a better fit. The three-dimension model was then employed in the rest of their research in which they concluded that positive brand information by the family has an important influence on brand equity formation process.
They further states that brand awareness also involves linking the brand brand name, logo, symbol to certain associations in memory. It can be concluded that brand awareness and brand association are very highly correlated. They distinguish brand awareness into two key dimensions; breadth and depth. From this perspective, the breadth can be considered as being aware of the brand example ikea and the depth as linking the brand to certain association linking ikea to family.
Consumers first need to be aware of a product before strong, favorable and unique associations are created in their minds. These two actions often happen at the same time but the level of association will determine how easily a brand is recognized or recalled from memory.
Brand awareness is a fundamental attribute of customer brand equity. Macdonald and Sharp describes it as being the essential for the communications process to occur as it precedes all brand dimensions.
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