Improving Validity of Market Research
D2: Make justified recommendations for improving the validity of the marketing research used to contribute to the market development on a selected organisation’s marketing plans
The organisation I have chosen to look at is Nike. The market research methods that they use are; street surveys, questionnaires and focus groups. When gathering market research, it is important to make sure that the data you get is valid, meaning it is trustworthy and reliable. By ensuring that the information is valid, it also ensures that it will be useful as well as valuable. The first research method we are going to look at is the street surveys. There are many things to take into consideration when conducting these surveys; who you are asking, where are you going to ask and how big a sample are you going to use. The reason all these factors contribute to the overall validity of the research is that if you just stop random people in the middle of town, at any time of the day, your sample won’t be useful to the questions you’re trying to answer. For example, if Nike was trying to answer questions that related to their interests in sport in relation to their occupations, and they used people from the middle of a weekday, then they may find that their sample consists of the unemployed, the retired and mothers with young children. To avoid having invalid results, Nike would have to conduct their market research during a more useful period of the day/week, such as a Saturday possibly near a sports centre. This would create a more useful and valuable sample, and while this ‘specific’ sampling may provide more useful data, you can’t always guarantee that controlling these variables will generate the correct sampling needed for the questions to be answered.
The second market research method is questionnaires. These are usually straight forwards however there are certain factors that have to be taken into consideration. These are things such as not making the questions too
The organisation I have chosen to look at is Nike. The market research methods that they use are; street surveys, questionnaires and focus groups. When gathering market research, it is important to make sure that the data you get is valid, meaning it is trustworthy and reliable. By ensuring that the information is valid, it also ensures that it will be useful as well as valuable. The first research method we are going to look at is the street surveys. There are many things to take into consideration when conducting these surveys; who you are asking, where are you going to ask and how big a sample are you going to use. The reason all these factors contribute to the overall validity of the research is that if you just stop random people in the middle of town, at any time of the day, your sample won’t be useful to the questions you’re trying to answer. For example, if Nike was trying to answer questions that related to their interests in sport in relation to their occupations, and they used people from the middle of a weekday, then they may find that their sample consists of the unemployed, the retired and mothers with young children. To avoid having invalid results, Nike would have to conduct their market research during a more useful period of the day/week, such as a Saturday possibly near a sports centre. This would create a more useful and valuable sample, and while this ‘specific’ sampling may provide more useful data, you can’t always guarantee that controlling these variables will generate the correct sampling needed for the questions to be answered.
The second market research method is questionnaires. These are usually straight forwards however there are certain factors that have to be taken into consideration. These are things such as not making the questions too