QUESTION DESCRIPTION

Group Assignment: Research Proposal

Due on Mar 1st(Friday)

• Assume that you are employed at a marketing research company. Now, you can choose a company/product/brand you would like to work with as your client.
• Your job is to identify a major marketing problem your client faces and determine how you can help your client solve the problem.
• In your research proposal, you will need to:

1. Choose a client to work with.
2. Define a major marketing problem: Ideally, you will focus on solving one major marketing problem for your client. For example, you would like to help your client to decide whether to make a strategic move such as:

oHome Depot wants to make efforts to expand its marketing toward women.

oAn online retailer wants to go offline to boost business.

oAn ice cream company would like to debut new packing, new flavors.

1. Develop research questions: Based on the marketing problem you have identified above, please develop several research questions that you would like to address and answer in this research project. In particular, a research question is a statement that identifies the phenomenon to be studied. That is, a research question is overall intention of the research—meaning whathas been proposed to solve. For example:

oAre we charging the right price, and what would the sale impact be by lowering/raising the price?

oWhat improvements could we make to existing offerings to improve customer satisfaction, and increase repeat sales and referrals?

oWhat new offerings could we introduce to our existing customers?

oWho is not currently buying from us?

oWhy are these people choosing a competitor or alternative?

ØA well-thought-out and focused research question leads directly into your hypotheses—that is, what predictions would you make about the phenomenon you are examining?

1. Produce research hypotheses: Next, you will need to produce a set of hypotheses that relate to your research questions. A hypothesis is about howthe research question is solved. Hypotheses are more specific predictions about the nature and direction of the relationship between two variables.

For example, drawing on customer satisfaction literature, you predict that: there is a significant relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction.

So, you can further break down the components of customer satisfaction and service quality:

oCustomer satisfaction: low, high

oService quality: bad, good

Now, you can formally hypothesize that:

oH1: there is a positive relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction.