Springfield Nor'easters case
Kevin Tame
Business Research
2/23/2010
Springfield Nor’easters Case
#1 Evaluate the research survey undertaken by the League Sports Association and by Larry
Buckingham, Nor’easters marketing director. Consider each step in the process that led to the findings of the survey
Buckingham started his research by using the League Sports Association survey done in
2005 and confirmed that families with school age children were more likely to attend sporting events. He also found that 73% of the audience of baseball games had an income ranging from
$22,500 to $75,000. This information was useful however Buckingham had done this only to confirm some of the anecdotal findings listed in the local newspaper. He knew that just a newspaper article and a three year old survey that covered four different major to minor league sports was not sufficient to make any decisions. He then decided that going forth with a market research survey was key in making any proper business decisions.
Buckingham’s first steps in developing a market research survey was to decide how to answer the questions of how many people will come to Nor’easters games and how much shall tickets cost? He started by calling a number of marketing directors of minor league teams in order to help him better understand their business and their marketing perspectives. Most of directors had similar ideas and he decided that with this little bit of guidance he could set out to design a survey. He knew that done correctly he would maximize information yield for management decisions and help to shed light on the trade-offs between ticket pricing and concession sales.
Realizing that a mail only survey would take too much time and money, Buckingham opted to mail out post cards that would direct participants to a web site. This method would reduce his cost and waiting time for the results. Before releasing the study to the public
Buckingham conduct a few pretest to see if questions were confusing and needed to be revised or
Business Research
2/23/2010
Springfield Nor’easters Case
#1 Evaluate the research survey undertaken by the League Sports Association and by Larry
Buckingham, Nor’easters marketing director. Consider each step in the process that led to the findings of the survey
Buckingham started his research by using the League Sports Association survey done in
2005 and confirmed that families with school age children were more likely to attend sporting events. He also found that 73% of the audience of baseball games had an income ranging from
$22,500 to $75,000. This information was useful however Buckingham had done this only to confirm some of the anecdotal findings listed in the local newspaper. He knew that just a newspaper article and a three year old survey that covered four different major to minor league sports was not sufficient to make any decisions. He then decided that going forth with a market research survey was key in making any proper business decisions.
Buckingham’s first steps in developing a market research survey was to decide how to answer the questions of how many people will come to Nor’easters games and how much shall tickets cost? He started by calling a number of marketing directors of minor league teams in order to help him better understand their business and their marketing perspectives. Most of directors had similar ideas and he decided that with this little bit of guidance he could set out to design a survey. He knew that done correctly he would maximize information yield for management decisions and help to shed light on the trade-offs between ticket pricing and concession sales.
Realizing that a mail only survey would take too much time and money, Buckingham opted to mail out post cards that would direct participants to a web site. This method would reduce his cost and waiting time for the results. Before releasing the study to the public
Buckingham conduct a few pretest to see if questions were confusing and needed to be revised or