Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

LSM523: Marketing Research and Analysis

Cornell University

Marketing Research and Analysis

Course Project

Instructions:

At the end of this course, you will submit a comprehensive proposal for a research project that shows how you will use the concepts from this course to address an issue in your organization. Use this worksheet throughout the course to help you gather your thoughts in preparation.

Part One – Initial Project Notes

Begin to assemble notes about questions you may have now or may have had about your own or other customers. Consider assumptions you may have made about them in the past and whether those assumptions were based on reliable information. Finally, identify a marketing research opportunity to explore (theoretically) in this course. You can focus on something real in your professional life or something hypothetical. Recall that marketing research can answer questions similar to:

What went wrong in development and/or marketing of a particular product, and why did it go wrong?
What new product or products should we offer?
What new marketing options should we pursue?
How well is a particular product performing?
In terms of marketing strategy, where do we go from here?

Which of these questions would you like to pursue in your research?

Part Two– Notes on Research Methods

Continue developing the notes you made in your first worksheet entry. Here, explore possibilities for using marketing research in the project you envision. Use the six stages of research to formulate a research objective. List your criteria for an effective research method and select a method (survey, experiment, or focus group) to use. List a few relevant sampling issues.

Part Three – Which Analyses Should You Use?

Think about the marketing research scenario you developed in previous entries. Record some preliminary notes here about which analyses might be most applicable to the situation. State explicitly what you want to know and then indicate which marketing analysis you would use to find that out.

Part Four – Research Proposal

For the last part of your course project, refer back to the earlier parts of this worksheet. Based on your observations, develop a comprehensive proposal for a research project.

Use the following to guide the development of your proposal:

Include a summary of the marketing issue you would like to explore. Is it about the success or failure of an existing product? Is it about the direction future products should take? Or is it about some other marketing issue?
Be specific about the research question you are asking
Indicate the form your research would take. Would it be a survey, experiment, focus group, or a combination? Would you use primary or secondary research?
Describe the kind of data you would collect and the way you would record it
Include a rough timeline for your project and practical considerations, such as where the research would take place
Speculate about how you might follow up on the research results. For example:

- Which actions would you take if you got particular results?

- What problems might arise in the interpretation of your results?

Include recommendations for analysis. Which of the marketing analyses would give you the most relevant information?
Finally, include some brief notes about whether you believe there might be any way that the organization could misinterpret or misapply the data you gather and, as a result, fail to make the best decisions possible.

Return to the course to submit this worksheet, including your completed proposal.