MARK2052 MARKET Research: Project Description and details
To be emailed to your tutor along with the final data file based on any changes you make by Week 10 (Friday 11:59pm). There is no Moodle link for this.
Women buy cars too!! And our client believes that the purchase behaviour of this segment is becoming more important by the day and hence want to study it. The problem is most car dealerships and the accompanying service centres know little to nothing about this segment.
So, what factors should they focus upon? A car dealership had a small focus group with 30 women of different ages and based on that arrived at a survey that was administered to just female respondents. Note that you don’t have data from the focus group, but only from the resulting survey.
They have hired you as a MR consultancy to understand what women want from a car dealership (and probably also the car – to use the right incentives to sell your product)!
One of your main aims should be to understand the deficiencies of the current survey and argue about the pros and cons of the current survey. Towards this, make notes when you are analysing the data. What else could you have asked that would have provided the client with more insights – Something that they could use to make that extra sale!
The project will investigate the motivations of Female consumers towards car dealerships and what they are looking for in those dealerships. Thankfully, the client has asked the respondents about that the customers look for in a car.
You will need to design your analyses to be able to a) ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS – i.e., a question that the manager can use to make an extra dollar (Every aim should be translated into an aim that helps in making this extra dollar) and b) answer these questions. All the answers from an aim that you craft should be able to help you tell the manager which ‘P’ (in the 4Ps) to change. If you can’t suggest changing a ‘P’ based on the aim that you posit, please revisit your aim! If you think that you have an important question that you have raised in part a) and cannot answer it with the data that you have, it will be an important question that you might want to include in the deficiencies section.
The class will introduce you to the tools available, but it is your responsibility as a group to run as many tests as possible to answer these questions to the maximum extent possible.
Please note that the emphasis in the project is primarily on your learning of a range of analysis techniques/
1) Pointing out and arguing about the merits and demerits of the survey
2) The logic of all the tests that you run to address the aims (each of which should translate to managerial usefulness). Please state the tests run even if you do not find significance in your results.
3) The lack of significant results IS NOT A NEGATIVE. The focus is on your analysis rather than your results, and of course what you can tell the manger.
Please keep a record of each meeting your group has as details need to be included in an appendix of the Final reports (refer to format of each of these reports for more information).
Data Description
After you are provided the data, the next step of any analysis is to gain a solid understanding of the data - who is in the sample and what patterns are in the data? This means you will need to carry out statistical tests that allow you to find out among other things, the composition of your sample, how the sample as a whole answered each question, whether all members in the sample answered the same way. For this last point you will need to choose a range of sub-groups (e.g., age, status, etc.) and explore whether members of these subgroups differ in how they answered all the questions (e.g., do they differ in their views towards comfort). Exploring the general pattern of responses, and any differences between various subgroups, allows you to know how to handle the data for the next stage of the analysis, e.g., if young and old have a very different pattern of response across a range of questions then it may be beneficial to split the data set for the second stage of analysis.
Therefore, your priority is to “get to know the data”, NOT to answer specific research objectives. It is highly recommended that your group generates some aims (for a good aim, see what has been discussed in bold previously) for this part of the analysis - that is, write down 4-6 aims you want answered from your descriptive analyses. (Aims may be in the form. of questions if you wish.)
One question that often arises is if the aims should be broad or narrow! This will depend on you. Forming broad has an advantage in the fact that they force you to run multiple tests and one of the results might be managerially actionable. Forming narrow ones brings down the number of tests, but you run the probability of not being able to formulate managerially relevant results.
These 4-6 aims are fairly broad-based – they are NOT just related to one or two questions in the questionnaire. They help you to understand the patterns within respondents’ responses. For example, in general, what is a woman’s attitude towards protagonists …; do old and young females differ in …... and these need to help the managers in changing one of their 4 Ps
These questions (aims) then guide what you do and how you write up the interim report (for yourself and not to be submitted). Please note, that in gaining this initial understanding of the data you will need to look at every part of the questionnaire. [NOTE: From this description you may end up gaining insight into some of your research objectives, however you do not fully address these objectives at this stage.] Feel free to schedule a meeting with your LIC (not the tutor) at any point if you need feedback.
To achieve this description of the data you should make use of the techniques that will be covered in lectures and tutorials. Once you have performed a range of analyses, you will need to write a detailed overview of what you found. This does NOT mean you provide a report consisting of copious tables with accompanying explanations. It means that you will need to think about the key interesting things you have found from your analyses, then write a coherent and flowing report so that the reader learns about the data. This implies that your report WILL contain different information than another groups' report because there are always many different ways to go about exploring the data (and your aims will be different to the other group’s!). Your written description of the data will be supported by key summary tables. To use an analogy – you only show the 'tip of the iceberg'.
NOTE: Summary tables are required – NOT dumped SPSS output tables. This is done since a key element of any report is clarity of communication – not just in the written overview, but also in any supporting material. Therefore, a summary table contains the key pieces of information from the SPSS output that you use in interpreting and making sense of the results.
Each member of the group is expected to contribute equally to the completion of each stage of the project. All students are expected to fill out an evaluation sheet for all their group-members and this feedback WILL BE GRADED. If discrepancies in members’ contribution arise in this feedback, the lecturer will discuss this with the appropriate students. Based on the feedback and these discussions, the lecturer reserves the right to adjust individual group member’s marks.