The purpose of this lecture is to help you get a sense of how to go about actually collecting some of this information.

Transcription

1 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-1 SLIDE 1 Today we're going to be talking about market research. The objectives are that you be able to explain the uses and importance of market research to explain the differences between primary and secondary data and to explain the pros and cons of using various types of research in specific situations. Up to this point, we've talked a lot about the marketing plan, specifically the situation analysis. I've talked a lot about some of the kinds of information that you need to get. Probably by now you're saying - Well, that's great but how do I go about getting all of this information. The purpose of this lecture is to help you get a sense of how to go about actually collecting some of this information. SLIDE 2 One of the things to understand first about market research is that there two types of information. One is subjective information which is more like intuitive prediction. The other is objective information which what you use market research for. Subjective information oftentimes is very important and very helpful especially if somebody has a great deal of history and background in a particular industry and has a lot of this sense of what's going on in a particular business or with a particular group of customers and they just have this sense in their mind. SLIDE 3 When you think about subjective information, it's especially helpful during idea generation for new product development. Just think about it. If you're brainstorming for new products - you're working with a particular technology and saying what are some of the things we could use this for - you're going to be brainstorming hundreds of ideas, perhaps. And, it makes no sense to do research on all of those, so you use your intuition to help narrow down that set to something that makes more sense. At the same time, there may be times in the market place where you know that a competitor is coming after you in one form or another and that you don't want to take the time to actually do research to find out - especially primary research that can sometimes take months to design and implement and analyze. SLIDE 4 Let me show you something about subjective research.

2 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-2 This is a study that was done in the mid-1980s. Don't be too worried about the date on it because I'm only showing you the questions that might still make sense for you today. Also take a look at the Journal on the bottom right-hand corner. You see that this was published in the "Journal of Consumer Research," which is a fairly prestigious journal and one of the things about academic research that you need to understand is that to get something published in one of these what they call "A Journals," something has to be reviewed by other academics to make sure that it is sound from a methodological standpoint. I'm going to take you through this little survey and show you some of the findings from it. Some of the things may seem intuitively surprising to you. That's one of the reasons why I set this up - helping you to understand that this is solid research. What they were trying to figure out was how good different groups of people are at predicting what the average American consumer would say at different times. So they took a survey and there were about 15 items on the survey. I've only shown you some of them here. They went to a huge group of average American consumers and asked them these questions. A nationally advertised brand is usually better than a generic brand. They asked all of these questions of these consumers and they got data on what percent of males agreed with those statements and what percent of females of agreed with those statements. Then they took that data and they went to four other groups of people and asked them to guess what it was that the average American consumer said. So, take out a pencil and a sheet of paper and let's do this. Go ahead, get a paper and a pencil. Okay. For the first one, write down what percent of males you think agreed with the statement that a nationally advertised brand is usually better than a generic brand. What percent of males of agreed with that statement? What percent of females agreed with that statement? Now the next one - I went fishing at least once in the past year. What percent of males agreed with that and what percent of females? I'm a homebody - what percent of males agreed, what percent of females agreed? The government should exercise more control over what is shown on television - what percent of males agreed with that and what percent of females?

3 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-3 Information from advertising helps me make better buying decisions - what percent of males agreed with that and what percent of females? I like to pay cash for everything I buy - what percent of males agreed with that and what percent of females? Finally, I am interested in spices and seasoning - what percent of males agreed with that and what percent of females? SLIDE 5 This is what the average American consumers actually said: 36% of males agreed with the first one and 35% of females. With the second one, it was 52 and 34. For the third one, it was 75 and 71. For the fourth one, it was 29 and 33. Normally in a classroom, people are groaning and laughing by now. How are you doing? The next one was 66 and 74. Then 72 and 70, and 57 and 75. How did you do? Thumbs up, thumbs down? I'm guessing you probably didn't do anywhere near as well as you thought you would. SLIDE 6 This survey was given to groups of MBA students, everyday consumers, line managers, and research managers. I hope you're laughing out loud by now because you can see that the MBA students had a predicted accuracy of 9%. I mean that's really awful! But then again, another group of everyday consumers were only accurate 20% of the time at guess what the average American consumer would say. And, these were average American consumers. Line managers were correct about 16% of the time. Research managers were correct at 23% of the time. Let's talk about that a little bit. Why is that you think the MBA students had such dismal results with this. Jot down a few ideas.

4 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-4 Hopefully you jotted down that MBA students are nothing at all like the average American consumer. You are in a totally different demographic group. You have much more education, you are a socioeconomic status than the average American consumer. You watch TV shows that they don't watch. You buy things that they don't buy. They buy things that you don't buy. So, you are very, very different from the average American consumer. Now when you look at other groups of everyday consumers, they're not much better at guessing what the average consumer says. That should tell you something about how good we are in general about guessing what it is that other people are going to say, or what they're going to like, or what they're going to do. Any idea why the research managers did best? They still didn't do very well, but they were the best. And it's because they tend to work with research and are sensitive to the fact that people are different than they are. SLIDE 7 The key point here is that subjective information or intuitive prediction can be very helpful under certain circumstances - when you're brainstorming, when you're doing idea generation, or when you have to make a decision very, very quickly. In reality, data works better most of the time. So, step and get ready to think about how you can collect data on what your customers think, what's going on with your competition, what's going on in the macro environment and so on. SLIDE 8 The first thing to think about here is how is market research used and it's used pervasively in marketing. For example, it's used in technology assessment, it's used in product development, it's used in developing marketing plans as well as launch plans for new products. But there's an important concept to understand here. Market research will not tell you what to do. You're not going to get a definite answer that actually says this is the right answer for this problem. All marketing research will do for you is reduce uncertainty and risk. That's all you can ask of it. Your own judgment still has to come into play. SLIDE 9

5 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-5 When you think about technology assessments, typically when an organization is looking at a new technology, they're trying to figure out whether or not this technology has potential for commercialization. And oftentimes, especially venture capitalists or various funders are looking for the commercialization potential but they also receive 10, 20, 30 ideas for technologies a week, or even at a day at times. So, they'll have so many of these on their desks that there's no way you could assess each one of them in depth. So, typically you will see organizations do a two step process on technology assessments. One is an initial very quick assessment where you take maybe 10 or 20 hours max to do a bunch of secondary research and then also to do a lot of interviews. For example, talking to the inventor of the technology and saying - So, what did you have in mind when you invented this and talking to people who would be potential customers of something that could come out of the technology and saying is this something that would solve a problem for you. But you do 6 or 7 interviews. You do some secondary research and you pull it together very, very quickly. That way you're able to zero in on out of that stack of 20 or 30 technologies which 2 or 3 have the highest potential. Then you go to those 2 or 3 and you do an in depth assessment. And, here you're putting in 40 to 80 hours of research digging in, talking more to the inventor, talking to more customers to potential distributors, to even potential competition. You may even do some survey research at some point but you are getting in much more in depth in understanding the potential of a particular technology. So, that's one set of market research uses. SLIDE 10 Another set is in product development. You've got a technology that has reached the stage of actually developing a new product or you are doing product line extensions, for example. You can do market research to understand customer problems and needs. You can interview people, you can do surveys. We're going to be talking more about these specifically in a few minutes. You can also get a sense of what potential market size might be. For example, can ask in a concept test what would be the probability that a customer would buy a certain item. So, a concept test could be a picture of a product, or a prototype of a product that's set in front of a customer, a potential customer, the target. And, they could say when you look at this particular product, how likely is it that you would definitely buy that product; or that you probably would buy; or that you might buy it; or that you probably wouldn't buy it; or that you definitely wouldn't buy it.

6 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-6 Using those 5 questions with any product can give you a great deal of information. Number one, it will give you a sense of what percent of the target group would actually be interested in buying this product. And, from there, you can go on to estimate market potential. Think for a minute. The group of people that you are doing this test on is representative of your larger target market and so if they are representative of the bigger group, if your sample is representative, then you could make the leap of faith that if 7% of your respondents definitely would buy this product that somewhere around 7% of the general population of your target would also be interested in this. Obviously these numbers are always squishy. And, as I pointed out earlier, it can only reduce uncertainty risk. It's not going to give you definite answers. This will give you a sense of whether a concept has any potential. They also use concept testing for developing advertising. They'll actually show customers a possible storyboard for a commercial and ask them whether or not they would buy the product based on that ad. In addition, you can use market research for market testing. For example, you could put together an experiment with two different markets and have 2 identical products, 2 markets that are very, very similar and change one variable - for example, the price. And, so you'll see what kind of price works better than another in a given type of market. So, you can put a new product in the market to see how well that new product sells in a very small area. Market testing is very important because to launch a product out nationally is an extremely expensive proposition and if you can discover what the problems are with a particular product before you launch it nationally, you can fix those problems and then make a decision as to whether this product really has potential. Do we really want to invest all this money in it or are we just going to pull it off and not move forward with it. Sometimes it's very, very prudent to pull the pull the plug on a product that you are sure is not going - or you're pretty sure is not going to fly. SLIDE 11 The third type of market research is used in actually developing your marketing plan - as all of these are when you really think about it. But, you can use market research to understand all of the 5-C's, for understanding context of the macro environment. You can do secondary research. in other words, you can go into government documents. You can do analysis on various databases that have been available by the government.

7 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-7 You can do research with customers both in terms of secondary research, finding things that have already been written or studies that have already been done by other people. And also going and talking to people. The same with competition and the same with within your own company, and the same with collaborators. So, you use market research to understand. And, we'll be talking about some specific approaches to doing this in a few minutes. You can also use market research to set objectives because once you're using research to help determine market potential or the market demand in a given time period, that will help you in terms of developing your plan. You can also use it for developing market strategy. So, let's take this a step further. SLIDE 12 When you're setting objectives, you're trying to estimate market potential and estimate demand. Now, market potential is basically how high the market could be. Now you always have to think in terms of is this an annual basis or is this in total. But let's just say for discussion purposes that we're talking annual basis. How many products of this sort do you think could be sold in a year. And, then you estimate demand. How many do you think really would be sold given the state of competition in the market, given the kind of marketing programs, the pricing and the promotion that you're actually putting against the product. SLIDE 13 When you're thinking about developing marketing strategy, you can do research for segmentation and targeting and I'll be showing you some examples of that in the segmentation class that's coming up. The same with differentiation and positioning. You can use market research to figure out your differentiation. Just setting them in your mind - differentiation is all about figuring out what it is your customers care about. And, once you've figured that out, you say how could we do that thing better or differently than the competition. So, you can use market research to understand your customers and your competition for the purpose of developing differentiation and then positioning.

8 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-8 You use marketing research to help with product design, to help with pricing - different pricing points; to different types of promotion and advertising. What sorts of rebates or coupons or advertising work with different types of customers. What works better? Remember in the very first class we talked about two different marketing plans, each of which spent a million dollars and one of them having a higher payout than the other. This is all about managing scarce resources and so you're using research and analysis to estimate which different types of strategies will be more profitable for you. Similarly, you can do that with place or distribution strategy. What would be the more effective channels for you to use in terms of getting a product to market. You can see that there lots of different approaches or different uses for market research. SLIDE 14 Here's a really interesting example. A number of years ago, Mercedes Benz used a process called data mining in order to better understand its line of sport utility vehicles. Data mining basically means that you gather sources of data from multiple places - and so you wind up with databases of demographic information, of sales history, of consumer history and so on. And, they were getting ready to launch a new line of SUVs and they were trying to understand more about who the target customer really would be. SLIDE 15 So they hired a consulting company to analyze all of this data. So they looked at demographic data in terms of people who had purchased SUVs. And, they cranked all this stuff through these huge computer programs and they discovered that there was one variable that actually predicted SUV ownership and that was dog ownership. People who have dogs buy SUVs. And, this little tiny bit of information that to most of you now seems - because you didn't know it before but now it seems totally intuitive. You say - Of course. You have to have an SUV or a station wagon when you have a dog because how do you manage those muddy feet otherwise? SLIDE 16 What they did then from a marketing standpoint was they defined their target segment as dog owners with a certain income level. And from there, they did a direct marketing campaign - just mail and telephone with the target in advance of the introduction.

9 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-9 And the product was actually sold out before it hit the showroom floor and the marketing costs were one tenth of a normal product launch. That's power of market research, of taking the time of front to really dig in and understand who your target customer might be because when you find the right target customer and lay out a product - you just simply show it to them - it goes easily through that target faster than a hot knife through butter. It is an absolutely powerful, powerful tool. SLIDE 17 We talked about three different sets of uses for market research. For technology assessment, for product development, and then for a marketing plan or in the case of a new product for launch plan. And, remember here - the research is not going to tell you what to do. The objective of market research is to reduce uncertainty and risk. SLIDE 18 Now let's talk a little about different types of research. I alluded to some of them earlier on and we'll just talk about them here. One is called secondary research, and one is called primary research. Now, secondary research is all about finding data that has been collected for another purpose and taking advantage of that. SLIDE 19 Within your own company, you have all sorts of internal company data. In the records, in the invoices, in the databases that you have about your customers. More and more companies are getting methodical about collecting data about their customers and their orders. And, the more internal data you have in terms of customers and costs, the better your marketing plan is going to be overall. Secondary research can also include and often includes external sources. Go look at the annual reports of competitors, you go to trade associations and professional associations and see what studies have been run that have been related to the question you're trying to answer. There are other reference materials. For example, the Statistical Abstract of the US, and the National Trade Database, and the Survey of Buying Power. These are all available in libraries. That's why it's really important to get to know your reference librarian. SLIDE 20

10 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-10 Trade and consumer publications, trade shows and professional exhibits directory, various search engines on the World Wide Web, and of course, research sites. Now you may not have access to a research site but I would bet if you went to the people who do research within your organization you would discover that your company probably subscribes to some research sites and you could get access to those. And then finally - I just can't emphasize this enough - the library is an extraordinary resource. Not so much because it's a big building that has a lot of books in it but because of a person called a reference librarian. That person thinks the most fun thing in the world is to go digging around and find stuff. They know where stuff is that you cannot imagine that you would ever be able to find. So, be sure to get to know the librarian in your company; and if you don't have one in your company, go to a college library that has a business reference librarian or even just to the library around the corner from your house. You'd be surprised what you can find. SLIDE 21 Other sources of information include customers, benchmarking, partnerships, various study trips, annual reports as I mentioned before, looking at the patents and licenses that have been registered with the government. There's lots of places you go to get information. SLIDE 22 Now secondary research can be really, really helpful. It can be relatively fast. Now you have to understand what fast means here. Fast could mean that you sit down with a reference librarian and you get online and you dig through books and you dig through company data; and you could do that in say 40 hours. That's fast because to design new research often takes months to design and more months to implement and more months to analyze. So, it can be very, very quickly. Along the same lines then it can be very inexpensive. I mean one person sitting in front of a computer or working with a librarian can cost a lot less than hiring a research company to go out and do a major research study for you. Data that you need may be readily available. You may find exactly what it is you're looking for and it might be very high quality. So, it's important to realize that secondary research is very, very helpful and big databases that you can get to through your company is often one good source to do that.

11 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-11 Now, at the same time, it could be out of date and it might not exactly address your question. Remember that secondary research is using the data that somebody has collected for some other purpose in order to try to answer your question. So, it might not exactly address your question or it might be a couple years old and so that's going to require that you really take some time and think about what it is that you want to get from the research. SLIDE 23 Now primary research usually falls into one of these 5 categories: surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation, and experimental. We're going to talk about each one of these a little bit and also talk about the pros and cons. First of all, with survey research, you're starting with a set of questions and you're asking people this set of questions. Now, you might be doing that with paper and pencil. You might be doing it with an Internet survey. You might be interrupting people in a shopping mall and face to face with a check-off list. But, you ask these people specific types of questions and they're normally questions where there are concrete answers. What do you think of this particular type of product, would you definitely buy it, maybe buy it, would you definitely not buy it, what are the things you like about it and what are the things you don't like about it. Survey research has some real major pros and cons. For one thing, they can actually give you some statistical significance because you ask a big group of people these questions; you can get some solid data, quantitative data in terms of what percent of your target actually finds this interesting. So, you're using a larger sample and your data therefore is going to be more credible. It's also on a per data point basis - much more economical than other types of research. There are also some major cons with surveys, so you have to be very, very careful. It's very easy to write questions in such a way that they're leading and so that consumers will answer the questions the way that you set them up to be answered. In addition, in all of these research - at least surveys, interviews, and focus groups - you will find that people try very hard to tell you what it is you want to hear. So, you never really know for sure if you're getting the real deal. The third con is that the sample you use for a survey might not be representative of the bigger target group that you're looking at. So, you'd get a whole bunch of data here that means absolutely nothing.

12 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-12 And another big con which is related to one of those pros - a con is that you get numbers. You get numbers that you can take out to 6 decimal points - but it could be garbage. So, one of the problems with surveys is that you sometimes wind up getting the illusion of accuracy. So, you have to be very careful. It's important to hire someone who knows how to design surveys and knows how to help you pick your sample in order to develop a good, reliable survey. Interviews, on the other hand, involve talking face to face or one on one with individual people. These could be customers, or they could be competitors, or they could be potential manufacturers. There are all sorts of interviews you can do. But we're going to talk primarily about customers here. One of the key pros about an interview is that you can get tremendously rich data. You can sit in an interview and if somebody looks at you and makes a faces and says, "Yeah, well, I guess I like that product." You as an interviewer can say, "Well, you didn't seem real enthusiastic about that. I mean, while you said you were interested, your body language told me that you weren't maybe so interested. Could you help me understand what it was that you were really thinking when you said that?" So, you can also follow up on threads. For example, if somebody says about a product, "I really like that product because it will help me solve this problem." And then the interviewer can say - This problem? And then the interviewee typically will say - Well, yeah. And, they'll go off and they'll talk more and more and more about it. So, the thing about interviews is that you can follow up questions and you can dig in and go deeper. Another example would be if you say to someone, for example a consumer who is buying a cake mix and you're talking about them - Why is it that you buy cake mix? And, let's say that our target who is a housewife with family says, "The reason I bake cake mix is because I really like to bake." And, then the interviewer can say - "And why is that important to you?" And, then the interviewee says - "Well, I like to bake because it makes the house smell good." "Oh, why is that important to you?" "Well, because when the house smells good, my family is happy." "Why is that important to you?" "Well, because I'm a mom and I really want my family to be happy." Now, you can do exactly that kind of research whether it's personal computers or SUVs or software. But those depth interviews really allow you to get at rich data. So, you can get rich data and you can follow up on unexpected things. At the same time, there are some real cons to interviews.

13 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-13 Number one - your interviewee will be reading your body language. If you smile or give them any kind of positive feedback on a particular answer, they're going to think that's what you want to hear and they'll tell you more about that. Another thing is that the data is actually only valid for the person who is answering the questions. You can't be positive that person is representative of the full target group. In other words, that the data coming from that interview is generalizable to the population that this person is a sample of. It's really important to do a number of interviews until you start hearing the same data over and over, until you start getting the same answers over and over, in order to get a sense that you've got some common answers here. Another con for interviews is that it's quite expensive. And, when you think about an interviewer who is oftentimes a psychologist spending an hour talking to a consumer - that's a whole lot more information per data point than a survey would be. Focus groups involve getting 6 to 10 people in a room. Never more than 10 - that's almost too many. And once again, these people should be representative of the target group that you're thinking about. You can sit down once again with a trained moderator and show them some ideas and ask them some questions about their beliefs and values or what they think about various products. You can get some really rich data here like you can get from interviews. You can follow-up on threads and go deeper on certain ideas. And on top of that, the people in the group kind of bounce ideas off each other, so you can get lots of really rich data that way. At the same time, there are some real cons to focus groups. I'm sure you've been in a classroom or in a room where one person dominates and just kind of takes over and then everybody else shuts up. So, a real problem is that if one person really starts to dominate the discussion. This is one reason why it's important to have a trained moderator do this because they're pretty good at gently shutting people down. Another problem is that people in the group tend to follow what they think are the socially desirable answers that other people in the group give, so they tend to herd a little bit. So, you have to be careful along those lines. Like interviews, you have 2 other cons. This sample group that you got, 6 to 10 people, might not really be representative of the bigger sample. There's always the chance that you get this group of 6 or 8 people who are actually out on one end of your target group. They're really not representative.

14 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-14 And they're also fairly expensive. They're not as expensive as interviews, but they're much more expensive than surveys in terms of per data point. Now, be very careful here because lots of high tech companies make the mistake of running 2 or 3 focus groups and then deciding that they have an answer to their problem and they go out and launch to market and then they don't understand why it doesn't work. Focus groups are only as good as the group of people you talk to and there's just no guarantee that they're going to be representative of the bigger group. The next form of research is called observation and this is probably one of the more reliable forms of research. you actually watch people doing something. So, you may put them in a room with a 2-way mirror and give them a product to play with. Then you just watch what they do. If they have trouble starting up the product or getting it initialized, you figure out what are the steps that they go through trying to get it started. You see how frustrated how they get or you see how easy something is. Another example of observation research is called "ethnography." They actually hire, many companies actually hire people who are trained in ethnography or anthropology in order to actually go and observe people in various habitats like their homes using certain types of products. Quicken is very well known for doing this. Intuit makes a software package called Quicken which helps people manage their money and they put out product upgrades on a fairly regular basis - at least once a year. And, one of the things that they do in order to continually be upgrading this software is that they observe people using it. They actually have employees who will go hang out in a software store - let's say a Best Buy or a Circuit City. And, they hang out by the software area and they wait and they watch if somebody looks at Quicken and then if somebody buys it. And, if somebody buys it, they follow them out of the store and they go up and they show them their ID and say, "Hi, my name is... and I work for Quicken and can I follow you home and watch you use this product." Yeah, I know you're laughing, right? But a certain percent of people will say - Yes, sure, come on home and watch me. And, then the researcher has to say, "Now you must understand that I'm going to come and watch you use the product but if you have any problems, I can't help you because the purpose of the research is to figure out how you use it and what you do with it. Do you understand that?" And, the consumers will say, "Well, yeah, okay." They still have some problems from time to time but they have discovered really rich data through things like this. These are the times when you discover the work-arounds that people use. How do they figure out how to make something work?

15 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-15 So, the pros of observation research - biggest pro is you get the real deal. Nobody is telling you what they think you want to hear. You're just watching them do things. At the same time, this also has some cons. It's very time consuming. Instead of having a researcher tied up in an interview for an hour, you might have a researcher tied up for a half a day with somebody. Now, once again, you're getting rich data and it's the real deal but it's extraordinarily expensive and time consuming. Then finally, we have experimental research. You set up an experimental group, you set up a control group, you change one variable and you see what happens. In the case of marketing, you might take a new product and put it into 2 different markets. Let's say 2 different geographic markets, 2 different cities that are very closely matched in terms of their demographics and the people who shop in that city. And, they're basically the same product and then you change one variable. For example, in one of those markets, you charge a higher price. And, then you sit back and you wait and you watch and see what happens to sales. So, you track the sales for several months before you run the experiment. Then you change the price and you track the sales for a couple of months after that and you see what happens. You can do experiments with different types of products, different design products with different types of advertising, with different distribution channels. So, the only limiter here is your own imagination on how to do experiments. So, the pros - once again like observational research, you get the real deal. It's the most scientifically valid research and sometimes you can even get at causal relationships. What is it that causes something to happen? Why is that somebody did this? At the same time, experimental research is as expensive if not more expensive than observation and it's very time consuming. Then of course, you always have the problem of if you designed your research badly, designed your experiment badly - this is a con you could have with any of these primary research tools or approaches. You could wind up with garbage.

16 MMBA 6530 Week 2, Lecture 1-16 The next question becomes which one should I use. And, in reality, companies that are fairly sophisticated with market research use several of these at the same time. For example, the process that I've seen used most often is that with a new product idea, you'll do maybe a couple of focus groups or definitely start out with a few interviews and find out what it is that cranks people's crank about this kind of a product. What works, what doesn't, why are they buying it? And, so you get this really rich data and so you gather 10 or 20 or 30 interviews to gather some information and then you can start to get a sense of some patterns. As a result of that, you formed some ideas in your mind about what might be going on. So, you might go into some focus groups and see how they react - if you get the same kinds of answers. And, then if are, then you can test this on a broad scale by putting together a survey for a big chunk of your target. You've got some hypotheses that a certain percentage of your target audience is going to be interested in this thing. A survey will give you some data that actually is more reliable and generalizable to the bigger group. Using a combination of these - survey, interview, focus group, observation, experimental techniques - will give you the best outcomes in terms of doing research. That's an overview of the primary research tools and some of the pros and cons of each one. SLIDE 24 Our objectives for this particular lecture were that you be able to explain the uses and importance of market research. I think we've gotten that. You should be able to explain the differences between primary and secondary data and you should be able to explain the pros and cons of using various types of research in specific situations. As you're working on the simulation, you are going to have more and more research data that you can use. The difficulty will be sorting through it and spending enough time to understand the learning s that are in the data.