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Lesson#18
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INTERNATIONAL MARKETING RESEARCH PROCESS
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INTERNATIONAL MARKETING RESEARCH PROCESS
Four Steps of International Marketing Research
Framework for international marketing research:
Marketing research are the formal studies of specific
situations. As discussed in the earlier lectures
major issue in decision making is that managers often fail to
appropriately understand the issues or
problems and hence end up making right decisions for wrong
problems. Since international markets are
often foreign to a marketer there are even more chances that the
marker mat miss-understand the
problems / issues. To avoid such scenarios it is beneficial
first to conduct exploratory research for
understanding the issues / situation better.
A business research process consists of four steps;
Step 1:
Defining the problem (the decision for which info. is needed)
and research objectives along with:
–
market
structure
• size of
market, stage of development etc.
–
product
concept
• meaning of
product in a particular environment
Marketing research project may have one of the three types of
objectives;
• Exploratory
research - is to gather
preliminary information that will help define the problem
and suggest hypothesis
• Descriptive
research - is to describe things
such as market potential for a product,
demographics, or attitudes of customers
• Causal research
- is to test hypothesis about
cause-and-effect relationships
Step 2:
Once research objectives are properly defined the marketer /
researcher should then develop the detailed
plan for conducting the research. A detailed research plan
should include the following five aspects;
Developing the research plan
– Determining
specific information needs
• research
objectives must be translated into specific information needs
– Plan for
gathering secondary information
• information
that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose -
relevant, current, impartial (objectively collected & reported)
– Primary data
collection plan
• information
collected for the specific purpose at hand - research approaches : observation,
Page
55
survey, experiment
– Deciding contact
method
• mail,
telephone, personal
– Detailing the
sampling plan
• sampling unit,
sample size, sampling procedure
Step 3:
Implementing the research plan
• data
collection phase is generally the most expensive & most subject to error - wrong
implementation, problems in contacting respondents, biased or
dishonest answers,
problems with interviewers (mistakes or short-cuts)
Step 4:
Interpreting and reporting the findings
• both
researchers & managers must work together at this stage - researchers know
methodology better while managers understand problems and
possible management solutions
better
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