Key Tools In Your Marketing Research Survival Kit by Michael Richarme
Situation 1: A harried executive walks into your office with a stack of printouts. She says, “You’re the marketing research whiz—tell me how many of this new red widget we are going to sell next year. Oh, yeah, we don’t know what price we can get for it either.”
Situation 2: Another harried executive (they all seem to be that way) calls you into his office and shows you three proposed advertising campaigns for next year. He asks, “Which one should I use? They all look pretty good to me.”
Situation 3: During the annual budget meeting, the sales manager wants to know why two of his main competitors are gaining share. Do they have better widgets? Do their products appeal to different types of customers? What is going on in the market?
All of these situations are real, and they happen every day across corporate America. Fortunately, all of these questions are ones to which solid, quantifiable answers can be provided.
An astute marketing researcher quickly develops a plan of action to address the situation. The researcher realizes that each question requires a specific type of analysis, and reaches into the analysis tool bag for. . .
Over the past 20 years, the dramatic increase in desktop computing power has resulted in a corresponding increase in the availability of computation intensive statistical software. Programs like SAS and SPSS, once restricted to mainframe utilization, are now readily available in Windows-based, menu-driven packages. The marketing research analyst now has access to a much broader array of sophisticated techniques with which to explore the data. The challenge becomes knowing which technique to select, and clearly understanding their strengths and weaknesses. As my father once said to me, “If you only have a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail.”
Overview
The purpose of this white paper is to provide an