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Rakesh Kumar Singh

Name : RAKESH KUMAR SINGH

Roll No. : 510910259

Learning Centre : Systems Domain (2779)

Subject : Marketing Research

Assignment No. : Set – II (MK0004)

Date of Submission : 2010

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MBA Semester – 3
MK0004 – Marketing Research
Assignment Set- 2

Q.1 a. Briefly explain the functions of a research report. (4 marks)

Ans: A research report serves as a means for presenting the problem studied, the methods and
techniques used for collecting and analyzing data, the findings, conclusions and recommendations. It
serves as a basic reference material for future use. In addition, it also serves the following functions –

 It is a means for judging the quality of a research project.

 It is a means for evaluating the researcher’s competence.
 It provides systematic knowledge on problems and issues analyzed.

b. What is conjoint analysis and perceptual mapping? Give examples. (6 marks)

Ans: Conjoint analysis: Few decisions we make in life are cut and dry (except harvesting wheat). Any
time we make a purchase decision, we are taking into account the variables such as price, colour,
benefits, value-added services ... and we compare them against our choices —- Mercedes or Lexus, AT&T
or MCI, chocolate silk pie or jello (Okay, not all decisions are difficult). A conjoint analysis helps model
the choice process consumers go through when simultaneously placing value on various attributes of the
product or service options. Would I pay another $1,000 for the warranty package or $500 more for the
fancy rims?

Example: West Group recently conducted a study to evaluate packaging and pricing options for a
health and beauty product. A conjoint study among current users and potential customers helped to
identify the best price point for the product as well as the most important attributes they should
highlight on their packaging.

Perceptual mapping: If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a perceptual map is worth at least 50 cross-
tabulations. Some people would rather see an answer, than read about it. Perceptual maps help
illustrate several concepts simultaneously in one picture. The most common request is to map how the
client compares to several competitors on specific attributes and then contrast the ratings against the
relative importance the customers place on each attribute.

Example: How does Zowie Company compare to their top five competitors? Zowie thought their
customers most associated them with providing high quality and a creative curriculum and this helped
Zowie set their pricing strategy. However, the map helped illustrate that three other competitors were
almost equally strong in high quality and creative product positions. The map further helped them to
look at other strengths that did differentiate them from their competitors.

Q.2 a. List the rights and responsibilities of respondents in research. (2 marks)

Ans: The rights and responsibilities of respondents are given as under:

A respondent who, agrees to participate in a marketing research project has the ethical
obligation to provide the supplier, and hence the client, with honest and truthful answers. The
respondent can abstain from answering a sensitive question, but falsifying the answers is ethically
improper.

Any respondent who participates in a research project has the following rights:–
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 The right to privacy,

 The right to safety,
 The right to know the true purpose of the research,
 The right to know the research results,
 The right to decide which questions to answer.

b. Write a note on market based assessment and process based assessment to ascertain competitive
advantage. (8 marks)

Ans: Market-based Assessment

1. Market Share: Market share is measured as a percentage of total industry sales over a specified
period. Clearly, there are problems in assessing competitive advantage using market share. A company’s
market share can change dramatically, depending on whether the market is defined as global, is a
particular export market, domestic market, regional market, a city, a segment of users, or is based on
product usage.

The change in market share over time is a vital indicator of competitive dynamics, particularly
during the growth stage of a product or market. It indicates whether the firm is ahead, abreast, or
behind the market’s total growth rate.

2. Recall Share: Recall share is the percentage of customers who name the brand when they are asked
to name the first brand that comes to mind when they consider buying a particular type of product.
This indicates the consumer’s top-of-mind brand awareness and preferences and gives a measure of
advantage to that brand over others in the market.

3. Advertising Share: Advertising share is the percentage of media space or time a brand has of the total
media share for that industry, often measured simply as money spent on advertising. This is likely to
lead to a change in recall share. Advertising share is another measure of the current competition that a
firm faces.

4. R&D Share: R&D share is a company’s research and development expenditure as a percentage of
total industry R&D expenditures. This is a long-term predictor of new-product development,
improvements in quality, cost reductions, and hence market share. It is a very important measure of
future competitiveness in many high-technology markets. All of these shares can be obtained from
either survey data or secondary data.

Process-based Assessment

1. Marketing Skills Audit: Skills are the most distinctive encapsulation of the organization’s way of
doing business. One vehicle for assessing skills is the marketing audit. This is a comprehensive,
systematic, independent, and periodic examination of a business unit’s marketing environment,
objectives, strategies and activities. The audit should be based on customer orientation, or focus on
customer satisfaction as its overriding theme. The audit is simply a marketing research project whose
objective is to critically evaluate the way the firm performs in its environment.

2. Comparison of Relative Cost: Another measure of advantage is a comparison of the firm’s costs
versus those of its competitors. The company gains a cost advantage when its cumulative costs are lower
than its competitor’s. Competitors’ costs can be estimated from public data or interviews with suppliers
and distributors. Secondary data can also be used to obtain such data.
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3. Comparison of Winning vs. Losing Competitors: Key success factors can be inferred by analyzing
differences in performance among competitors. For this approach to yield useful insights, three difficult
questions must be answered. First, which competitors should be included in the comparison set?
Second, which criteria should be used to distinguish the winners from the losers (e.g. profitability,
growth, market share, creation of markets)? Third, what are the reasons for the differences in
performance?

4. Brand Equity: Brand equity is defined as a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand, which add to
or subtract from the value of a product or service to a company and/or its customers. The assets or
liabilities that underlie brand equity must be linked to the name and symbol of the brand. They can be
grouped into five categories:
 Brand loyalty
 Name awareness
 Perceived quality
 Brand associations in addition to perceived quality
 Other proprietary brand assets: patents, trademarks, channel relationships etc.

5. Customer Satisfaction: In recent years, American business has become increasingly committed to the
idea of customer satisfaction and product service quality. The measurement of customer satisfaction
and its link to product/service attributes is the vehicle for developing a market driven approach.
Customer satisfaction research has been around for a long time, but it has become a fixture at most
large corporation only in recent years.

6. Total Quality Management: Recent years have witnessed a renewed emphasis on delivering superior
quality products and services to customers. With foreign competition steadily eating away the
profitability and the market shares of Indian companies, more and more of them are adopting total
quality management (TQM) to become more competitive. TQM is a process of managing complex
changes in the organization with the aim of improving quality.

7. Identifying High-Leverage Phenomena: Ideally, these are causal relationships that describe
controllable variables such as plant scale, production-run length, and sales costs per unit.

Q.3 a. Prepare a null and alternative hypothesis to find out if an MBA degree results in higher
employability chances and determine the type of tests you will use to arrive at a conclusion.
(10 marks)

Ans: Let us assume that an MBA degree results in higher employability chances. If p = P (Employed),
then we are testing the claim that p = 0.5.

Suppose we take into account 100 MBA degree holders.

a. If we get 54 employed and 46 unemployed, can we conclude p = 0.5?

Here, we probably would. We should expect around 50 employed and 50 unemployed MBA degree
holders, and this is not far off from the mark. This is the kind of outcome one would expect from a fair
survey if a MBA degree helps in getting employment.

b. If we get 89 employed and 11 unemployed, can we conclude p = 0.5?

We probably would not say p = 0.5 in this case. Why does the survey seem unfair? If it really was fair,
then this kind of outcome (while possible) would have a very low chance of occurring. It is much more
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likely that the survey is actually unfair. Here, the “given assumption” is that the survey is fair. Since the
probability of 89 employed and 11 unemployed on a fair survey is “exceptionally small”, we conclude
that the given assumption (fair coin) is probably not correct.

c. What would we say if you got 40 employed and 60 unemployed? What if we get 65 employed and 35
unemployed?
This is getting into a kind of gray area where it is hard to decide whether a fair survey would have a
good chance of getting these outcomes. When observations are on the borderline like this, it is harder
to choose between the two possible scenarios. Making these decisions is where hypothesis testing comes
into play.

Null Hypothesis – The null hypothesis, denoted H0, is a statement that the value of a population
parameter (e.g. population mean, proportion, or standard deviation) is equal to a particular value. For
the purposes of the test, we assume that the null hypothesis is true, and then decide whether there is
enough evidence to reject that assumption.

Alternative Hypothesis – The alternative hypothesis, denoted H1, is a statement that the parameter has
some value that is different than the one in the null hypothesis. These statements are all inequalities
and come in 3 forms: >, <, and ≠.

Test Statistic – The test statistic is a value that is used to decide whether to reject the null hypothesis. It
is a quantity based on the sample data and has a known distribution when the null hypothesis is true.

The General Idea of a Hypothesis Test

To run a hypothesis test, there are a few general steps,

1. Based on the question we want to answer, formulate the test as a choice between two hypotheses (the
null and alternative).
2. Find a test statistic whose distribution is known when the null hypothesis H0 is true.
3. Figure out if the value of the test statistic computed for your sample is an “unlikely” value from that
distribution.
4. If it is unlikely enough, reject H0 and conclude that H1 is more likely. If it is not unlikely, then
conclude that there is not enough evidence to reject H0. Note that this is not saying H0 is true – rather
it is just saying that there isn’t enough evidence to conclude that it is false.