Laddering technique

Chapter : 4 Exploratory Research

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Exploratory Research

(explore)

Descriptive Research

(describe)

Causal Research

(establish cause and effect)

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Three Types of Primary Data Research

• How do you explain income inequality in America?

• If we did a study asking people directly if we should tax wealthy individuals at a higher rate, what would we miss?

A good way to start a research project is to first find out what people know.

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Example: Understanding Consumers

• Research conducted to gain ideas and insights to better define the problem or opportunity confronting a manager.

• When conducted correctly, exploratory research should provide a better understanding of the situation and possibly yield hypotheses—but this kind of research is not designed to come up with final answers and decisions.

• Exploratory research is appropriate for any problem about which little is known. It becomes the foundation for a good study.

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Exploratory Research

HYPOTHESIS

A statement that specifies how two or more measurable variables are related (testable!)

Some examples:

(H1): Women are more likely than men to make impulse purchases of our brand. (H2): Decreasing price by 10% will increase unit sales by 30%. (H3): Adoption of our new product will be greater in Northern states than in Southern States.

The most formal outcome that might be achieved form exploratory research is one or more hypotheses about

the key aspects of a situation.

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• Develop hypotheses

• Better formulate the manager’s decision problem

• Increase researcher’s familiarity with the problem

• Clarify concepts

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Why Conduct Exploratory Research?

• A search of statistics, trade journal articles, other articles, magazines, newspapers, books and/or online sources for data or insight into the problem at hand.

• Example: Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/)

– Social Media and Brand Loyalty

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1. Literature Search

• Interviews with people knowledgeable about the general subject being investigated.

• Depth Interview vs. Personal Interview

• Some possibilities:

– those who work with it (e.g., employees, consultants)

– those who study it (e.g., researchers, analysts)

– those who live it (e.g., consumers)

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2. Depth Interviews

• An interview conducted among a small number of individuals simultaneously; the interview relies more on group discussion than on directed questions to generate data.

• As a result, respondents are often more spontaneous and less conventional than they might be in a depth interview.

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3. Focus Group ①

• Typically 8 to 12 people

• 1.5 to 2 hours in length

• Homogeneous within group; heterogeneity introduced across group

Q. Given that the participants in any one group should be reasonably homogeneous, how can a firm be sure that the full range of opinions will be represented?

Answer.

• Participation carefully screened

• Sessions recorded and transcribed

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3. Focus Group ② Characteristics

• Moderator: The individual that meets with focus group participants and guides the session.

• Moderator’s Guidebook: An ordered list of the general (and specific) issues to be addressed during a focus group; the issues normally should move from general to specific.

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3. Focus Group ③

• 7 Characteristics of Good Focus Group Moderators

– Superior listening ability

– Excellent short-term auditory memory

– Well organized

– A quick learner

– High energy level

– Personable

– Well-above-average intelligence

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Source: Thomas L.

Greenbaum, The Handbook

for Focus Group Research,

2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks,

Calif.: Sage Publications,

1997), pp.77-78.

3. Focus Group ④

• The Dark Side of Focus Groups

– It’s easy for managers to see what they expect to see in focus group results.

– Focus groups are only one form of exploratory research- they should not be expected to deliver final results or answers to decision problems- yet many managers seem to use them for that purpose.

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3. Focus Group ⑤

“Focus groups are the crack cocaine of market research. You get hooked on them, and you’re afraid to make a move without them.”

• The use of powerful analytic technologies to quickly and thoroughly explore mountains of data to obtain useful information.

• Although most forms of exploratory research are qualitative in nature, data mining involves sophisticated quantitative analysis of data held in a company’s databases.

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4. Data Mining

Since many consumers buy peanut butter and grape jelly together, why

not run a joint promotion between Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s grape

jelly? But would you have expected that men buying diapers in the

evening sometimes buy a six-pack of beer as well? Supermarkets

discovered this when they mined checkout data from scanners. So they

placed diapers and beer near each other, then place potato chips between

them-and increased sales on all three items! On the near horizon is RFID

(radio frequency identification) technology using “smart tags” on the

diapers and beer to tell whether they wind up in the same shopping bag.

Retailers use RFID technology that tells what items are purchased

together and when. For how much online data mining can reveal about

you personally and the ethical issues involved.

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Example: Data Mining ①

DATA MINING ① Reveals Personal Information ② Collected via Tracking Devices ③ Enables Personalization and Targeting

1-800-flowers.com used data

mining to develop successful

promotions after discovering

that professional, suburban

moms were a key

demographic for them.

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Example: Data Mining ②

One analysts working with Costco purchase data discovered that people

who purchased meat were likely to also purchase eggs. He also discovered

that people who purchased soft drinks were also very likely to purchase

eggs. This was a puzzling result; were eggs becoming so popular that they

were being prepared with almost every meal? A closer look revealed that

all of the data came from a one-week period in March.

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Example: Data Mining ③

• Case analysis involve the study of selected examples or cases of the phenomenon about which insights are needed.

– Benchmarking

– Ethnography

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5. Case Analyses

Aeropostale has used observations of its young customers

at amusement parks, concerts, and lots of other locations

to help select the clothes it carries in its stores.

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Example: Cases Analyses

• One frequently used type of case analysis is benchmarking, which involves identifying one or more organizations that excel at carrying out some function and using their practices as a source of ideas for improvements.

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5. Case Analyses ① Benchmarking

Companies have long used L.L. Bean as a benchmark

for order fulfillment efficiency.

• The detailed observation of consumers during their ordinary daily lives using direct observations, interviews, and video and audio recordings.

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5. Case Analyses ② Ethnography

• Sometimes individuals have difficulty expressing their true feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. Consumers will not describe many of their motives and reasons for choice because a truthful description would be damaging to their egos.

or…

• Other motives they cannot describe, either because they do not have the words to make their meaning clear or because their motives exist below the level of awareness.

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6. Projective Methods ①

• Methods that encourage respondents to reveal their own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors by shifting the focus away from the individual through the use of indirect tasks.

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6. Projective Methods ②

• Type of Projective Methods

– Word association

– Sentence completion

– Storytelling

– Role playing

Projective methods/techniques are designed to provide information on _____________.

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6. Projective Methods ③

• Discovering Purchase Motives

– Manifest motives are motives that are known and freely admitted.

– Latent motives are either unknown to the consumer or are such that he/she is reluctant to admit them.

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⑴ Motivation Theory

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⑴ Motivation Theory

• What is the first word that comes to your mind when I say:

– Oreo Cookies

– Tide Detergent

– Gluten Free

– American Express

• How would you describe people who owned a:

– Prius

– Hummer

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• Means-End Chains: A tool to understand consumer motives

– One way to achieve a “customer focus” is to use means- end chaining.

• Basic Ides: link product attributes and consumer consequences to personal values held by consumers.

– The key to effective “consumer focus”: show how the attributes possessed by a product will benefit consumers and help them achieve the things (values) that are important to them.

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⑵ Means-End Chains

⑵ Means-End Chains

• How do marketers identify the elements of a means- end chain (attributes, consequences, and values)?

• Laddering: qualitative research technique involving a series of directed questions to identify linkages between attributes, consequences, and values.

– “Why is this important to you?”

• Laddering can be used to understand the “latent” motives of consumers.

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⑵ Means-End Chains

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Example: Laddering