Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

Perreault−McCarthy: Basic
Marketing: A
Global−Managerial
Approach, 14/e

8. Improving Decisions
   with Marketing
   Information

Text © The McGraw−Hill

Companies, 2002

Improving Decisions with Marketing Information 223

issues. Then, armed with that information, someone else calls back to solicit dona-

tions. Legitimate marketing researchers don’t do this!

The relationship between the researcher and the manager sometimes creates an

ethical conflict. Managers must be careful not to send a signal that the only accept-

able results from a research project are ones that confirm their existing viewpoints.

Researchers are supposed to be objective, but that objectivity may be swayed if

future jobs depend on getting the “right” results.^6

Good marketing research requires cooperation between researchers and market-

ing managers. Researchers must be sure their research focuses on real problems.

Marketing managers must be able to explain what their problems are and what

kinds of information they need. They should be able to communicate with special-

ists in the specialists’ language. Marketing managers may only be “consumers” of

research. But they should be informed consumers—able to explain exactly what

they want from the research. They should also know about some of the basic deci-

sions made during the research process so they know the limitations of the findings.

For this reason, our discussion of marketing research won’t emphasize mechanics

but rather how to plan and evaluate the work of marketing researchers.^7

Developments in information

technology are making it easier

to gather information about

customers, but marketers need

to be sensitive to concerns that

some consumers and critics have

about privacy. Zero-Knowledge,

the Canadian company featured

here, positions itself as the

“consumer’s advocate on

privacy.”

Effective research

usually requires

cooperation

The Scientific Method and Marketing Research

The scientific method—combined with the strategy planning framework we dis-

cussed in Chapter 2—can help marketing managers make better decisions.

The scientific methodis a decision-making approach that focuses on being objec-

tive and orderly in testingideas before accepting them. With the scientific method,

managers don’t just assumethat their intuition is correct. Instead, they use their

intuition and observations to develop hypotheses—educated guesses about the rela-

tionships between things or about what will happen in the future. Then they test

their hypotheses before making final decisions.

A manager who relies only on intuition might introduce a new product without

testing consumer response. But a manager who uses the scientific method might say,

“I think (hypothesize) that consumers currently using the most popular brand will

prefer our new product. Let’s run some consumer tests. If at least 60 percent of the