Marketing Research is designed to share the stimulating, challenging, fascinating, and sometimes frustrating world of research-supported marketing decisions with undergraduate students preparing to be future marketers. We have used our research and teaching experience and our numerous research industry contacts to create a textbook full of practical examples and researcher insights. For undergraduate students just learning about marketing research or graduate students advancing their research knowledge in the marketing arena, Marketing Research is designed as a valued reference. Students who become marketers, as well as those who become research specialists, will find Marketing Research of current and future value.

An Approach Based on Demystifying the Research Process

There are several approaches to teaching marketing research. You could present the big picture and context first and then break down the overall process into its parts. Or you could start with techniques and build each into a phase of the overall process until at the end the overview is known. This book takes the approach that students need an overview first in order to appreciate the nuances and details of the specific techniques they will be asked to employ to develop high-quality information. This belief led us to develop the text in four parts. The first part presents the overview, while Parts 2, 3, and 4 provide the details on methodologies and techniques. Some teachers might prefer to jump into survey design in the beginning and then explain the research process through that one methodology. But our experience reveals that the technique-first approach leaves the student at a loss to understand why the survey is given so much importance when other techniques have different but equally valuable merits.

We Set the Stage for Ethical Issue Discussions—You Decide How Often You Discuss Them

Students are just like research practitioners when it comes to ethical dilemmas: Some don’t see the ethical issues in any decision, while those that do may not have thought about them enough to take a stance. Only a few will have clearly drawn their ethical boundaries when it comes to either marketing or marketing research decisions. Now more than ever it is important to talk about ethical issues in our classrooms, but it is sometimes difficult for our students and us if we don’t have the right foundation. Chapter 7 gives your student the foundation for discussing ethics in marketing research. It ties those critical issues to the research process diagram. It will be obvious to them that they will need to understand their own ethical principles in order to make good decisions at each stage of the marketing research process.

We consciously chose not to feed our students "ethical " boxed examples in every chapter. Identifying the ethical dilemmas in this way makes it far too easy; they think that such dilemmas come complete with neon signs. In fact, the ethical dilemma is often under the surface, not clearly obvious and often below a researcher’s personal radar. While we made sure that the research studies we profile have their share of ethical struggles, we believe you, the instructor, should guide the choice of how often and in what fashion you bring those issues to the attention of your students. Some of you may decide that reading Chapter 7 is sufficient; others will want to reinforce the dilemmas we overview in Chapter 7 in every subsequent chapter’s discussion.

Online marketing and information privacy is currently the hot ethical topic. A2004 Gallup Poll revealed that people are more worried about the onslaught of marketing messages resulting from sharing their personal information (especially their e-mail addresses through a survey, a marketing promotion, a purchase, etc.) than they are about identity fraud. Clearly if you want to cover only one ethical issue in depth, information privacy should be the one. We’ve given you some special discussion aids to help with this discussion: The Direct Marketing Association Information Security Guidelines in Appendix B, as well as an overview of the European Union’s data privacy directive and the United States’ safe harbor agreement in Chapter 7.

Theory with the Right Balance of "How-To"

There is a continuing struggle in our classrooms between how much theory to combine with practice. We think the adage expounded in medical education works well in our research classroom: Learn one, do one, teach one. Many of our reviewers reinforced this perception—they have designed their marketing research courses around a research project (real or hypothetical) or series of projects. Over the decades that we’ve been teaching research methodology, we’ve tried both approaches and find they work in different ways equally well. So how much "how-to" is enough? If students are going to learn about it in the text, we decided to offer them enough "how-to" to let them execute what they have learned.

There are several places where this balance is and needs to be most evident: the chapters devoted to research proposals, qualitative research, survey research, statistical analysis, and presenting results. The request for proposal (RFP) starts the research process for most large projects, yet most texts ignore it. We walk our students through the process and give them a full-fledged example to follow. You’ll find the RFP for the Ogilvy Research Award–winning Covering Kids campaign project in an appendix to Chapter 6 and learn how the proposal process was managed from a Snapshot in the same chapter.

Marketing researchers, in their search for insights, are turning more frequently to the qualitative techniques. These tools took a back seat to the quantitative ones during the last 20 years, which may explain why many of our students think research is synonymous with surveys. To correct this misconception, we’ve given students the "what and why" of numerous qualitative techniques, not just the focus group. While the focus group is the most frequently used qualitative technique, it may also be the most abused. So we’ve given students something they have rarely had access to: a focus group discussion guide. Now you and your students can see how a 24-year veteran moderator structures a focus group. It’s in Appendix A.

The core of most of our research courses, regardless of where we teach or at what level, is the survey. We offer Appendix 15a on crafting effective measurement questions following Chapter 15, as well as detailed chapters on survey processes, measurement approaches, and measurement scales. You’ll even find the different types of measurement scales detailed for online and non-Web survey approaches.

There is no getting around the math when you teach research. But we don’t all teach our courses at the same level when it comes to the statistical and analytical processes. Because in practice marketing research can cover everything from basic statistics to multivariate methods, we’ve divided this material so that no matter at what level you structure your course, your students will find everything they need, now and later.

Reviewers told us that research reporting is often shortchanged in their courses. Those who build their course around a project are often time-starved at the end of the term. What they need is a chapter requiring limited classroom coverage of material. One of our reviewers told us that our last chapter, "Presenting Insights and Findings," is so well done that he wouldn’t need to cover the material. Of course, we know he will—at some level—as it is far too important a topic to rely on tired, stressed students extracting the right conclusions from what they read. However, what makes this chapter outstanding is something obvious but not often present: a complete, annotated management report. We’ve embedded the report for the main Behind the Scenes project, which is woven throughout several chapters. We want the student to be able to visualize what a report looks like. It’s what both verbal and visual learners told us they needed so that they can create a professional-looking report for their own project or evaluate and critique one by a another student or—in the future—by another researcher.

Teachers, Students, and Researchers Influenced the Content and Its Design

Every pedagogical and content element is carefully crafted to give the student a rich, learning experience and to make teaching this complex subject easier for the instructor. Each chapter has several features, pictured in the Walk- Through that follows, so you will become familiar with their color and heading formats:

• Behind the Scenes is the student’s glimpse into what is really going on in research. Much that is done in research is proprietary information. If marketers openly shared all their successes and failures, they would lose competitive leverage. This feature gives us the ability to share those stories that researchers couldn’t or wouldn’t share with their names attached. And it gives us an opportunity to share with the student that researchers and their research are subject to the foibles of human personality. These vignettes are perfect for discussion, and we’ve woven the projects and the characters involved throughout the chapters. Although names and brands are withheld to protect the firm, this doesn’t mean the characters or story lines are any less real. We promise to keep these vignettes constant over several editions—to help reduce your class preparation time—unless you tell us one of them isn’t working for you or we learn of another scenario that is just too good to keep to ourselves.
• Snapshots are mini–case studies, embedded within each chapter to entice the student to read about current marketing research. Other texts put these at the end of the chapter, but our research tells us that few students read beyond the chapter summary, unless specifically assigned to do so. We hope to entice them to read about the research that is actually being done in their environment, with firms and organizations they know or have heard about. These profiles are as timely as we could make them, many happening just months before publication. And they are detailed enough to share some aspect of methodology or process. Unlike examples found in competitive texts that are written only from details gleaned from periodicals, ours are based on firsthand information. We went straight to the source for our facts, interviewing researchers and marketers who daily make the difficult decisions about research projects. By talking with dozens of practitioners, we learned their perspectives on where marketing research, as an industry, is headed and the subtle changes taking place within the practice of research. As a mini-case, each Snapshot is designed for class discussion and specifically relates to concepts within the text of the chapter where it is located.
• PicProfiles are research stories with a memory visual. These may be about a controversy or about research driving an advertising campaign (like the one about Karastan and Andie MacDowell). In each case, the visual helps tell—and helps the student retain— the research story.
• Pull quotes share the insights of researchers, educators, industry icons, entrepreneurs, and managers. These are quick ideas, from noteworthy individuals—both contemporary and historical— that influence how we do research and how, as marketers, we interpret and use the research done by others. By their nature, each is the opinion of a single person, so many can be the foundation for argument or lively discussion.
• Close-Ups are in-depth profiles of a current research practice or an expansion of a marketing research concept. You’ll find several within the text. One offers more advanced analytical techniques. Some offer a detailed execution of an example we start in a Behind the Scenes vignette or a Snapshot. We’ve separated them from the text to highlight the material in a special and extremely timely way. This separation gives the instructor the choice to include or exclude the material when assigning the chapter. But we hope you’ll assign the material, as this feature permits us to tell a longer story or offer a deeper perspective, and each offers fertile ground for extensive class discussion.
• Cases offer an opportunity to tell research stories in more depth and detail. Of course it helps that we have research contacts with really interesting stories to tell. You’ll find stories from Ogilvy Research Award winners on children’s health care initiatives, and you’ll learn about the American Heart Association’s first paid advertising campaign and the research behind it, as well as how the U.S. Tennis Association is revitalizing its sport and, in the process, conducting the largest research project ever related to sports. You’ll learn how State Farm conducts the study that identifies the most dangerous intersections in the United States and uses the data to improve our safety, and you’ll see how Campbell-Ewald uses research to measure the construct of respect. You’ll learn how one man with a vision can move airlines as you follow the research being done by the Open Doors Organization in its attempt to substantiate the growing economic power of travelers with disabilities and how NetConversions helps Kelley Blue Book design the most powerful automotive site on the Web. You’ll learn how Wirthlin Worldwide helped the American Red Cross use research to revitalize donations and how Starbucks, Bank One (now J.P Morgan Stanley), and Visa dreamed up a new financial product that won BusinessWeek’s outstanding product honor. And you’ll learn how the low-carbohydrate diet craze inspired Donatos Pizza and how Yahoo! and ACNielsen moved Web metrics a giant leap forward. These are research projects just completed, or in several instances, ongoing.
• End-of-chapter appendices offer rich detail on a special topic. Depending on how you structure your course, or the level of preparation of your students, you may not need this developmental or advanced information. You’ll find two appendices (Chapter 5) that offer hints on searching of bibliographic databases. Another (Chapter 6) offers a request for proposal (RFP). Two more (Chapter 15) delve more deeply into crafting effective measurement questions and various types of pretesting, while one (Chapter 12) explores more complex experimental designs. We’ve separated them from the text of the chapter so that you can choose whether your students would benefit from this material.
• DVD supplemental texts explore topics of interest but only if your students’ projects and assignments move in a specific direction. You’ll find these on the text DVD:
  • A Summary of Marketing Research to 1960 (Chapter 2)
  • Decision Theory Problem (3)
  • Marketing Information Sources (5)
  • Seagate Proposal (6)
  • Qualitative Research with Children (9)
  • Creative Legacy of Qualitative Research (9)
  • Measuring Attitudes on Sensitive Subjects (14)
  • Tips on Intercept Survey Design (15)
  • MindWriter and Simalto+Plus (22)
  • Palm Grove data set (22)
  • Citing Electronic Sources (23)
• Icons are used to depict a relationship. Usually these are small graphic symbols that appear in the headers of an exhibit, a Snapshot, or a Close-Up; sometimes, they will appear in the margins. We’ve used one to highlight award-winning research (it looks like a trophy), another for foundation marketing theory needed to understand a research methodology (the 4-Ps), another connects various Snapshots and appendices related to the Covering Kids research story that crosses several chapters and culminates in a video case (a doctor’s medical symbol), another reveals the Lexus SC 430 research story (car keys), another spotlights possible ethical dilemmas (scales), and, finally, another (film reel) indicates a video case.

Visual Learners Get the Tools They Need

As teachers of long standing, we struggle with the shifting nature of the way students absorb material and learn. When we started teaching, our students were primarily verbal learners: They learned from listening, reading, and presenting. What we discover daily in our own classrooms—that now we have more visual learners than verbal ones— shapes a very important feature of this textbook. Visual learners need diagrams and memory visuals connected to written labels in order to grasp material. Marketing Research contains a fully integrated series of process diagrams (30 in all) that encourages the visual learner to follow the steps in the research process. The primary research process diagram, presented in Chapter 4, looks like a flowchart but with special use of color and shape to denote specific research stages and steps. Students who learn visually will appreciate the reinforcement of the colors and symbols as they progress through the course. And they get that reinforcement with "breakout" process elements. These are more detailed representations of the specific steps in a portion of the process that the student is studying in that chapter. You won’t find a more integrated visual tool for learning in any other marketing research textbook on the market.

Visual learners appreciate video, so we scoured the McGraw-Hill video library to find films that would offer opportunities for discussion of research principles. In addition, we developed detailed video discussion guides to help make that discussion a fruitful teaching and learning exercise. Adapting a marketing story to tell a research story isn’t as easy as we might sometimes like, so Mc- Graw-Hill made us an important commitment. In preparing this textbook, if we discovered a rich research story, ripe for video translation, McGraw-Hill would make those videos. You’ll find four custom-crafted video stories for use in your marketing research class. Both case videos and written cases are on the text DVD. This is another commitment fulfilled—students now have the opportunity to watch the videos in preparation for class. If you don’t want to use the video during class time, or even if you do—visual learners tell us it helps to see a video story more than once to extract all its material—students can prepare cases more thoroughly for in-class discussion or in-class writing exercises. You won’t need to lend your video to a student who missed class on the day a crucial video discussion takes place.

Verbal Learners Get the Detail They Crave

We still have verbal learners in our classes—thank goodness, since many of their instructors are themselves verbal learners—and we have text features for them too:

• Key terms in the margins help reinforce the definitions of key concepts. We need our students to learn the jargon of research so that they can follow us and their classmates during class discussions. Our reviewers tell us that this is the most important design element to facilitate that jargon transfer.
• Marginal reference notes refer students to something they read in a previous chapter that will help them grasp current material, call attention to something they are learning now that will help them understand subsequent material in a later chapter, or elaborate on a current concept to help make it stick in their minds. Verbal learners tell us that when they see something more than once, especially in different contexts, they are more likely to remember it.
• Four types of discussion questions offer the student the challenge to understand key terms and try marketing research decision making on their own. That’s pretty standard fare for marketing research texts, but we decided to take review questions further. Every text author takes substantial time developing exhibits that expound on critical concepts. Yet how often do discussion questions encourage a student to spend time with an exhibit? Our students told us that they often skip the exhibits, considering them "extras." But we know they aren’t extra; they are central to understanding course material. So we have discussion questions (From Concept to Practice) that ask the student to spend time with the exhibits. If you want them to do that too, just assign those particular questions. And remember how the Behind the Scenes vignettes are developed around teaching points? Now you have discussion questions that deal with these vignettes. If you want to use the vignette for class discussion, assign the Behind the Scenes discussion questions.
• Web exercises help students learn more about research. Most students think they know all there is to know about the Internet. But what many of them can’t do well is find specific information when they need to or evaluate the quality of the information they find. They miss the distinction between browsing and searching. Our Chapter 5 appendices on search basics and advanced searching offer the tools necessary to convert browsers to searchers. Then subsequent chapters ask students to find something related to the topic—like a product tour on new qualitative content analysis software or a research firm that does a special type of research, such as a product taste test or mystery shopping. This is the type of searching they might do if they work as marketing managers or researchers.

Expect the Expected, but Anticipate—and Receive—More

• Do you want students to experience analyzing largescale research projects? You’ll find that some case studies on your text DVD come with extensive data sets. Your students can crank the numbers at whatever level you desire.
• Do your students need self-quizzing to help them grasp concepts? You’ll find Web-based quizzes so that students can reinforce and test their knowledge.
• Do you use computer-supported lectures? You’ll find PowerPoint slide sets for each chapter, with an important extra: Adobe PDF files of every text art exhibit. Now you have the text visuals you need to produce the visually rich classroom presentations and discussions that your visual learners need. Students will have these PowerPoint slide sets, too, so you won’t need to distribute yours unless you customize your set.
• Do you use tests to evaluate student performance? You’ll find a test bank with questions offering different levels of difficulty, so you can pick the ones appropriate for your teaching model.
• Do you want more information on a particular issue or topic than the text provides? Both you and your students will love the Marketing Information Sources supplement on your text DVD. Both electronic and print sources are covered because only a small portion of information that is valuable to a marketer is available on or through the Web.
• Do you cover decision theory as a model for valuing research? You’ll find a complete decision theory problem on the DVD.
• Do you involve your students in an actual research project? Then they will love the complete student project that is on the DVD, as well as the complete professional proposal they will find there.

Collaboration Created a Better Product

To bring a text concept to life, you have to have help from many people. So we extend our sincere appreciation:

• To Judith Violette, Director, Helmke Library at Indiana University–Purdue University at Fort Wayne (Indiana), who worked to develop the comprehensive marketing information sources files on the text DVD and whose knowledge of information search is the foundation for Appendices 5a and 5b, as well as the evaluation of Internet information within Chapter 5. She never fails to find more efficient and effective ways to help us search.
• To Dr. John "Rusty" Brooks Jr., Houston Baptist University, who so skillfully collaborated on the Instructor’s Resource Guide.
• To Dr. Tracey Tuten Ryan, Virginia Commonwealth University, who developed our PowerPoint slide set, test bank, and lab quizzes.
• To Jeff Stevens, in Florida Atlantic University’s public administration doctoral program, for contributions on missing data, portions of the multivariate statistics chapter, and the Simalto+Plus learning resource.
• To Nicole Samuels, in Florida Atlantic University’s MPA program, whose perspective and creative ideas vastly helped to improve the effectiveness of our case discussion guides.
• To several special Wittenberg University students:
  • Rebecca Torsell (’04), a wonderful faculty aide who developed comparative spreadsheets galore, tracked down research company ads, and researched companies and examples of research in action but, mostly, who freed us to write uninterrupted.
  • Erin Mowrey (’04) and Jim Kuklewski (Wittenberg, ’05), student directors in Wittenberg’s Center for Applied Management, who tackled the portfolio research and dealt with the day-to-day minutia so that we didn’t have to.
  • Monica McDonald (’05), who worked diligently to make sure that the sources on the DVD and company URLs were as current as possible when we went to press.
• To all those marketing researchers, advertisers, product managers, and organization leaders who have shared their projects, ideas, perspectives, and the love of what they do during hours and hours of interviews.
• To those marketing and research professionals who helped us develop written and video cases:
  • Julie Grabarkewitz and Paul Herrera, American Heart Association; Holly Ripans, American Red Cross; Mike Bordner and Ajay Gupta, Bank One; Laurie Laurant Smith, Arielle Burgess, Jill Grech, David Lockwood, and Arthur Miller, Campbell Ewald; Francie Turk, Consumer Connections; Tom Krouse, Donatos Pizza; Annie Burns and Aimee Seagal, GMMB; Laura Light and Steve Struhl, Harris Interactive; Emil Vicale, Herobuilders. com; Adrian Chiu, NetConversions; Eric Lipp, Open Doors Organization; Stuart Schear, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and Elaine Arkin, consultant to RWJF; Colette Courtion, Starbucks; Mark Miller, Team One Advertising; Rebecca Conway, The Taylor Research Group; Scott Staniar, United States Tennis Association; Danny Robinson, Vigilante; Maury Giles, Wirthlin Worldwide; and Ken Mallon, Yahoo!.
• To Nancy Barbour, a valued sounding board who has become so much more than a Managing Development Editor; and to our Sponsoring Editor, Barrett Koger, who has negotiated for this text far more than most first editions have a prayer of achieving; and to Linda Schreiber, our Publisher, who felt strongly enough about us as successful authors to enthusiastically support our proposal.
• To the remainder of our very special McGraw-Hill team, for making the book a priority:
  • Editorial Director: John Biernat
  • Marketing Manager: Dan Silverburg
  • Media Producer: Damian Moshak
  • Project Manager: Laura Griffin
  • Production Supervisor: Heather Burbridge
  • Designer: Mary Kazak
  • Photo Researcher: Keri Johnson
  • Photo Coordinator: Jeremy Cheshareck
  • Supplement Producer: Cathy Tepper
• To our faculty reviewers for their insights, suggestions, disagreements, and challenges:

Phipps Arabie
Rutgers University–Newark

Joe K. Ballenger
Austin State University

Gary Benson
Chadron State University

Greg Bonner
Villanova University

James Curran
Bryant College

Harold Daniel
University of Maine

Carol W. DeMoranville
Northern Illinois University

Rene Desborde
Kentucky State University

Pola B. Gupta
Wright State University

Philip Hurdle
Elmira College

Michael Hyman
New Mexico State University

Richard Kolbe
Kent State University

Frederick Langrehr
Valparaiso University

Aron M. Levin
Northern Kentucky University

Hector R. Lozada
Seton Hall University

Yuko Minowa
Long Island University

Rajan Nataraajan
Auburn University

Joseph Orsini
CSU–Sacramento

Deborah L. Owens
University of Akron

Wayne Roberts
Southern Utah University

Donald E. Stem Jr.
Washington State University

We are also indebted to dozens of students who read parts of the manuscript and pointed out areas of confusion so that we could make concepts more understandable and who revealed that much of marketing research is either misunderstood or operates below their radar. We accept the challenge of debunking their myths and making the truth more visible.

This book was 2.5 years in the writing, but more than 25 years in the making. We hope you find it as teacherfriendly and as student-enriching as we designed it to be. We want our students—and yours—to be able to visualize what research is really like in the trenches and behind the scenes. Every text element, every exhibit, every photograph, every screenshot, every Excel chart or SPSS printout, and every supplement has been chosen with this idea in mind.

We also hope you and your students discover, or rediscover, how interesting marketing research can be.

Donald Cooper
Pamela Schindler