Question

Review the following business scenario and complete. Recently a major toy manufacturer was challenged by its management team to grow sales of its top brand. The brand's marketers faced a big challenge and were considering a bold (and potentially risky) change to help shift the brands growth trend upward. Consumer research was carefully crafted to understand shoppers'reactions to the revised packages. 1) In a paragraph, explain what this company might be interested in using marketing research techniques to discover. 2) Identify at least 4 variables that are important in this exploration. 3) Using the above identified variables, list three Hypotheses or Research Questions: 4) In a paragraph, explain what methods of research collection you would use to find the answers to the above RQs and Hypotheses. Where would you look for the data, who would your sample be, etc. 5) Assign your variables to one of the following Data Sets and run the appropriate statistical test for your hypothesis/research question. Do note that this data will work best for t-tests, correlations and regressions. Data Set One Data Set Two 6) Based on your findings, what are the managerial implications from this data? What actions would you suggest the company take? Again, write this in paragraph form.

Answer 1

ANSWER:

Ans 1)

The foremost function is to - "develop the sale of the max out brand name”

Therefore, the discovery of awareness could be-

• Consumer needs and wants

• Consumer perceptions (regarding the brand) attitudes and buying behavior

• Selling activities and improvement areas thereof

• Sales potential (to forecast sales)

Ans 2)

Effective research requires both independent (controllable factors) and dependent (uncontrollable factors) variables. Researchers use independent variables to affect changes in the dependent ones.

Our 4 important variables could be

• Price of revised packages (independent)

• Average sales (Dependent)

• New customer acquisition (Dependent)

• Sales growth (Dependent)

Ans 3)

A hypothesis is basically a proposition that you wish to verify. You use it to examine the causes behind a certain phenomenon or to understand the association between variables.

To formulate a hypothesis you should ensure that it is conceptually clear, theoretically-oriented (ie. supports or refutes theories) and empirically testable.

Our 3 Hypotheses could be-

• A higher product price leads to a decline in average sales because customers are thrifty in nature

• A lower product price enables higher customer acquisition because it helps to steal some of the competitor's customers

• A lower product price leads to a growth in sales because it leads to a rise in consumer demand

Ans 4)

Methods of data collection are primary (collecting fresh data observations for the research) and secondary (using already collected data/observations for the research). For our purposes (Le the variables we've chosen), secondary research on company records Is good enough.

Where to look for the data -

• Pricing - Company records - pricing through the ages for different products

• Average sales - Company records - A summary of your Bill transactions

• New customer acquisition - Again Company records - Sales and marketing costs along with the number of new customers acquired.

• Sales growth - Same as above i.e. Company records again, for revenue generated month-on-month or year-on-year, increase in demand etc.

The sample is going to be drawn from the bills and other consumer specific, purchase related data as for sampling design, we could go in for a random probability sampling (or stratified random sampling for more insight)