Question

The Garden of Unearthly Delights is a vibrant festival precinct that operates annually in the Adelaide CBD across February and March. Each year, The Garden of Unearthly Delights offers a unique festival playground including multiple performance venues, bars, carnival rides, an array of world foods, market stalls, and unexpected sideshow surprises. The Garden of Unearthly Delights began with just one performance tent in 2000. Over the past nineteen years it has evolved into the greatest arts event in town and the heart of Adelaide’s summer arts festival season.

There are three main types of marketing research were discussed in the week 4 lecture (exploratory, descriptive, and causal). Imagine that you have joined the board of directors for the Garden of Unearthly Delights as a Market Research Advisor. Explain to the Board the three types of research they could do before the 2020 festival, and give examples of how, and when, each type of research would be appropriate to use.

Answer 1

Exploratory Research: It is done by the surveyor in the initial phase of any project where the prior and initial information is not enough. It is done to understand customer better, to get the insights and discovery of the possible overlooked issues. It is not much about statistical data. It is more about initial open ended questions which gives rich insights & information into targeted audience and help understand white spaces, issues and boils down to the action items that might further require statistical interpretation.

Descriptive Research: This type of research makes up bulk of online surveys. It is usually conclusive in nature and provides statistical insights into the respondents. Unlike exploratory, descriptive is structured & preplanned. This research is done when you want to study opinion, attitude & behavior of a group of same set of customers for the collection of inferable data with the help of predefined set of responses. It provides significance of the responses given by the group which can then be extrapolated to the population surveyor is trying to study to infer better results.

Causal Research: Causal research again is preplanned and structured. However it is different from the descriptive in a way that descriptive is more observational in nature whereas causal research is about finding the cause and effect between the variable. It is done to identify which variables are the cause and which variables are the effects. It deciphers causal relationship through experimentation. Sometimes it is also termed as conclusive research.