What important issues must researchers consider when they plan to collect data online?
> In 1999, several single European nations banded together to form the European Union and converted their individual monetary systems over to the euro. Do you believe there will ever be other economic communities that would follow this path? Explain your r
> What product factors affect the rate of adoption of innovations?
> Develop a team presentation for your class that summarizes your findings. Conclude your presentation with comments on what your team believes the company was doing that was particularly good and what was not quite so good.
> Some countries have been critical of the export of American culture via movies, television, music and many American consumer goods by U.S. businesses. What about American culture might be objectionable? Can you think of some products that U.S. marketers
> Explain the differences between undifferentiated, differentiated, concentrated, and customized marketing strategies. What is mass customization?
> List the criteria marketers use to determine whether a segment may be a good candidate for targeting.
> What are some of the ways marketers segment B2B markets?
> List and explain the major demographic characteristics frequently used in segmenting consumer markets.
> What is market segmentation, and why is it an important strategy in today’s marketplace?
> What is market fragmentation, and what are its consequences for marketers?
> Working as a team with two or three other students in your class, select an organization in your community that practices marketing. It may be a manufacturer, a service provider, a retailer, a not-for-profit organization—almost any organization will do.
> What do marketers mean by creating a brand personality? What examples can you come up with of uses of brand anthropomorphism?
> How do marketers use perceptual maps to help them develop effective positioning strategies?
> What is product positioning?
> In recent years, for packaged products the FDA has proposed that companies include the percentage daily value for added sugar on the nutrition label. The primary reasoning behind this proposal is that it would provide information on added sugars comparab
> What is behavioral segmentation?
> Explain the process of consumer psychographic segmentation.
> What is a target marketing strategy?
> A few years ago, Anheuser-Busch Inc. created a new division dedicated to marketing to Hispanics and announced it would boost its ad spending in Hispanic media by two-thirds to more than $60 million, while Miller Brewing Co. signed a $100 million, three-y
> In this chapter, you learned about the use of geotargeting and its capability to more precisely provide consumers with benefits such as promotions that are especially relevant and impactful to a particular group. Could geotargetting backfire for a compan
> You probably had more than one school in mind before you ultimately decided on the college or university you are now attending. To better understand how consumers make decisions, prepare an outline that shows how internal influences like perception, moti
> During the last week of class, your professor explains how she wants to employ a gamification strategy next semester to further motivate and engage students, and she is asking for your help. Develop a simple gamification strategy that she can use in the
> We learned in this chapter that when considering a product need, consumers have an evoked set of brands and a consideration set of brands. With some of your classmates, conduct a simple research study and explain your results using the following steps. S
> Rank the conversion actions in order of importance and include an explanation of why you have ordered them as such. Identify whether they are short-term oriented as they relate to the organization’s objectives or long term-oriented (or, in some cases, bo
> If you could choose only two marketing metrics (remember metrics, not conversions) to track for each of these websites, identify which two you would select for each website and explain why.
> Are there specific products that you purchase where branding does not matter and has never mattered to you? What characteristics of the related products and your own individual preferences can help explain why this might be the case?
> How would data be collected for each element, and how might management at JC Penney utilize that data to provide loyal customers with a very strong relationship with the firm?
> In what ways could JC Penney expect to measure the four elements of CRM above within the context of a reward program such as this?
> What is a cost-per-order? What kind of information do marketers gain from this metric?
> What is a conversion? What are some examples of conversions on an e-commerce website?
> What is a click-through rate, and how is it calculated?
> To what does the lifetime value of the customer refer, and how is it calculated?
> Define marketing metrics. How can marketing metrics help marketers understand the performance of different marketing initiatives and provide greater control?
> What is the difference between purchasing digital advertisements with a cost-per-impression structure versus a cost-per-click structure? Is one better than the other?
> What are marketing analytics, and what kinds of insights are enabled by today’s marketing analytics solutions? What are predictive analytics?
> What is the difference between structured and unstructured data? What are some examples of each?
> Find an example of a brand extension that you believe negatively impacted consumer perceptions of the brand. Explain why you believe this to be the case by citing aspects of the brand extension that you believe were most detrimental as well as specific e
> What is data mining? For marketers, what are some of the most important applications?
> Describe the various sources of Big Data for marketers.
> How would you describe Big Data? What are some of the most significant sources of competitive advantage that Big Data offers?
> Explain the concepts of share of customer, lifetime value of a customer, customer equity, and customer prioritization.
> What is CRM? How do firms practice CRM?
> A study conducted by Adobe found that 77 percent of marketers surveyed believe that data on customer purchase histories can improve marketing performance, yet only 21 percent actually use it. Similarly, 88 percent believe that behavioral data can have a
> Describe the Internet and how Web 3.0 and 4.0 provide greater opportunities for marketers to interact with their customers.
> Imagine that you are building your own e-commerce site. Having a keen understanding of the importance of defining and putting in place a set of conversions and metrics in advance of launching the site, you have incorporated the definitions and developmen
> For this assignment you are going to act as a manual version of a software program that conducts sentiment analysis. Select a sample of comments (between three and five that do not contain any explicit words or expressions) created by users in response t
> As an admissions manager for a college or university, you are interested in exploring the use of predictive analytics within the admissions process to bring in students with a higher likelihood of graduating from the school and achieving greater levels o
> As an entrepreneur, you know you want to open a new grocery store, but you aren’t sure what kind of products you want to carry. Discuss the importance of national brands, store brands, and generic brands. Which brand or brands will your new story carry?
> When we consider data quality, what are the differences among validity, reliability, and representativeness? How can you know the data have high levels of these characteristics?
> What is a (computer) cookie? What ethical and privacy issues relate to cookies?
> GIGO—garbage in, garbage out—is mentioned in the chapter. What is the significance of this concept to market research?
> What are the main methods to collect primary data?
> Describe the purpose of casual research. How does it differ from descriptive research?
> What techniques can marketers use to gather data in exploratory research? How is this type of data collection useful?
> Explain how marketers practice the societal marketing concept and sustainability.
> Why is defining the problem to be researched so important to ultimate success with the research project?
> Define the concept of customer insights and the role it plays in market planning decisions.
> Assume that you are working in the marketing department of a major manufacturer of athletic shoes. Your firm is introducing a new product, a line of disposable sports clothing. That’s right—wear it once and toss it! You wonder if it would be better to ma
> How does a marketing decision support system (MDSS) allow marketers to easily get the information they need?
> What is the marketing information system (MIS)? What types of information does it include?
> How do probability and nonprobability samples differ? What are some types of probability samples? What are some types of nonprobability samples?
> What is a cross tabulation? How are cross tabulations useful to analyze and interpret data?
> Explain what descriptive research is.
> Explain the difference between primary data and secondary data.
> Are you willing to divulge personal information to market researchers? How much are you willing to tell, or where would you draw the line?
> Marketers in numerous industries can benefit from conducting market research on children. What do you think is the youngest age that would be appropriate to conduct research on a child? Why do you select this age?
> The American Psychological Association does not yet recognize Internet addiction as a problem. Should it? Why and why not?
> More and more companies are starting to employ customer insight specialists to make sense of the data collected about their customers. Do you think this position is really needed within companies, or is it just a fad? Explain your reasoning.
> You have been recently promoted at P&G and have been tasked with identifying five cobranding opportunities. These cobranded products could be P&G products or a P&G product cobranded with another firm’s brand. Describe each of the cobranding opportunities
> Some marketers attempt to disguise themselves as market researchers who want to ask you questions when their real intent is to sell something to the consumer. What is the impact of this practice on legitimate researchers? What do you think might be done
> Would you alter the settings on your computer to disallow cookies? Why or why not?
> One unobtrusive measure mentioned in this chapter involved going through consumers’ or competitors’ garbage. Do you think marketers should have the right to do this? Is it ethical?
> Would you be willing to participate in an ethnographic research study within your own home? Why or why not?
> Your firm is planning to begin marketing a consumer product in several global markets. You have been given the responsibility of developing plans for marketing research to be conducted in South Africa, in Spain, and in China. In a role-playing situation,
> Your marketing research firm is planning to conductsurveys to gather information for a number of clients. Your boss has asked you and a fewother new employees to do some preliminary work. She has asked each of you to choosethree of the topics (from among
> How does operational planning support the marketing plan?
> What is an action plan? Why are action plans such an important part of marketing planning? Why is it so important for marketers to break the implementation of a marketing plan down into individual elements through action plans?
> Give several examples of marketing metrics. How might a marketer use each metric to track progress of some important element of a marketing plan?
> What is utility? How does marketing create different forms of utility?
> You have been asked to give a presentation on the product life cycle to a small group of students who are interning at your firm this summer. Describe each of the stages of the product life cycle—introduction, growth, maturity, and decline—and give examp
> What is a test market? What are some pros and cons of test markets?
> Sometimes marketers will develop strategies to target multiple social class segments with the same product by offering it at different prices. What are some examples of products or brands that use this strategy and how do they accomplish it? Are there an
> Some critics of marketing have suggested that market segmentation and target marketing lead to an unnecessary proliferation of product choices that wastes valuable resources. These critics suggest that if marketers didn’t create so many different product
> What do you do when your customer starts to shrink, both literallyand figuratively? The sale of soft drinks in the U.S. is not what it used to be. The $98 billion soft-drink industry is beingchallenged by changes in consumers· attitudes toward bothsugar-
> Gamification was discussed in Chapter 6. For specific segments of a market, a gamification approach might help elicit a desired behavior from consumers, and of course in many cases the desired behavior is an increase in consumption of the related product
> Identify at least five alternative product options that you are interested in. Narrow down your selection to two or three choices. Which are the most feasible? What are the pros and cons of each?
> Describe the problem that might lead you to purchase this product.
> Make a final decision about which product you will purchase. Describe the heuristics that aided in your decision making.
> Use the Internet to gather some initial information about the product you chose. Visit at least two stores or locations where the product may be purchased to gather further information.
> If this is a product you have actually purchased, explain the reasoning behind your current satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product. If not, develop several reasons you might be satisfied or dissatisfied with the product.
> Explain the steps in the business buying decision process.
> What is a buying center? What are the roles of the various people in a buying center?
> Describe the buyclass framework. What are new-task buys, modified rebuys, and straight rebuys?
> How do we generally classify B2B markets?
> Trace the evolution of the marketing concept.
> Explain what we mean by derived demand, inelastic demand, fluctuating demand, and joint demand.
> How do B2B markets differ from consumer markets?
> What are gender roles?
> What are opinion leaders?
> What are reference groups, and how do they influence consumers?
