0:12
I have just finished covering the first three steps of the marketing research
process and I know what you must be thinking.
You must be thinking, wow, so many methods, so many ways to go wrong.
This is really confusing, which methods should I be using when?
0:36
in a structure that is very simple and it hopefully makes sense for you.
So here it is, one way to look
at what methods to use when is to simply ask two very important questions.
The first one is does a researcher know the question that he or she wants to ask?
If the answer is yes, you're in the problem solving domain.
If the answer is no, you're likely in the problem identification domain.
The other critical question is whether the respondent knows the answer.
And even then, even if the answer is yes, you might subsequently want to ask,
will she actually reveal the true answer.
Such as in the case, for
example, of the likelihood of recycling that I had just mentioned before.
With these two very simple questions, you can see you're able to qualify or
place the different descriptive, causal, and exploratory research methods
in a simple framework, that will hopefully help you sort out through the problems.
This matrix is not meant to be comprehensive.
Within each one of these methods, I have only listed the most often or
most commonly used, such as surveys, in-depth interviews,
focus groups, observational methods and experiments or AB testing.
This takes more refer to in a web context and access to a secondary research,
either from internal company owned customer base or
external providers such as etc..
So for the first example, let's go back to our by now famous and
well known Santander Serfin example.
What methodology did they use to finally come up with a meaningful segmentation and
decide on a product to launch for its specific segments?
2:23
How do they go about it?
First of all, they use secondary data to try to determine
what is the actual country's growth potential and
to come up with an actual real objective for what we should set ourselves.
Remember it was 730,000 cards in the next year and a half.
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Next they conducted focus groups to try to
determine what are the main impediments to credit card adoptions.
In other words, why were there only 5.5 million cards
when they had qualified up to 14.5 million customers.
And what they found out is that refusal to reveal the income was the main impediment.
So they concluded that they need to make the process of signing up for
a credit card very quick and speedy.
In addition, focus groups reveals what were the attitudes
of consumers to different service providers.
Next, they used their own customer data to understand patterns
of use for the different credit cards, and
to establish the different demographic profiles.
And finally they did a survey of 2100 consumers and non-consumers of the bank
to determine what are the most important attributes of credit card providers.
And to also validate other potential action variables
which could serve as a source of segmentation.
The key take away that you should take from this slide is that
one thing is clear, a combination of methods and
methodologies is the best way to tackle a meaningful marketing research problem.
3:54
Now let's look at another example from a complete different setting.
Let's take the case, for example, of Procter and Gamble.
They had come up with this electric floor mop and they were thinking about
launching this product in Europe, and in particular in Italy.
Now what kind of research will you have done first to try to
determine what is the best region of the country to first introduce this product?
4:54
But by actually conducting the focus groups as opposed to validating the south
of Italy as the prime target to launch this product, what they found out is that
in this woman's mind, vigorous mobbing the floor and scrubbing, actually
is associated with love for the family and the harder they do it, in their minds,
the more they actually sacrifice and love the families.
This single insight, led Procter and
Gamble to scrap the project of launching the product in Italy.
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Mario CapizzaniLecturer
