Learning objectives After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
1. Understand the role of measurement in marketing research
2. Explain the four basic levels of scales.
3. Describe scale development and its importance in gathering primary data.
4. Discuss comparative and non comparative scales.
Fast Food, Side by Side, Restaurant Location and Loyalty Among the more important problems facing the Burger King Corporation is selecting sites for new restaurants that will attract sufficient customer loyalty for the new store to be profitable. Since Burger King has many more major competitors today than just McDonald's or Wendy's, its traditional strategy of locating restaurant no closer than the three miles to McDonald's, on streets with high traffic, in neighbourhoods with schools, and in areas of predominantly middle-income families is no longer feasible. The traditional location section process did not include formal marketing research or assessing the significance of customer loyalty, but instead relied heavily on the experience and knowledge of the Burger King senior management team. Since the site-location model did not consider these criteria, sales forecasts for new restaurants often with inaccurate. To correct the problem, the marketing research department combined customer survey data with traditional sales and geographic data from existing Burger King Restaurants. New research objectives included measuring customer loyalty and its impact on the relationship between the site-location criteria and sales, as well as considering other criteria that would more accurately predict sales. To better understand customer loyalty, Burger King turned to Burke's (www.burke.com) Customer Satisfaction Division and its Customer Loyalty Index measures. New research showed that while traffic density was a significant indicator of sales. Neither the proximity of schools nor income levels of the surrounding are were good