Basic Marketing Research: Customer Insights and Managerial Action

The authors differentiate data-informed and data-driven managerial decisions and explain the manager's critical role in making sense of the data and the “why” behind it.

Manager's Focus short features explain how chapter information is relevant to today's marketing managers, emphasize the role of marketing managers in the research process, capitalize on the availability of marketplace data and offer guidelines for achieving the most usable results. These Manager's Focus entries are inspired and written by Jon Austin, a marketing research professor at Cedarville University with a strong background working with industry clients.

Ethics are presented as a foundational discussion, enumerating how “sugging” (using research as a sales tactic) produces mistrust between participants and the researcher, demonstrating how advocacy research (advocating for a particular position or point-of-view at the expense of seeking honest insights) should never be the reason for conducting marketing research, and emphasizing that research, not sales promotion, is the purpose of marketing research.

Research Windows provide a view of what is happening in today's world of marketing research. These features describe what is happening in specific companies and offer how-to tips and best practices. They prompt interest in the chapter topic and provide further depth and a reality check that classroom materials transition effectively to a wide variety of firms and industries. Examples include marketing research jobs and compensation, how online focus groups and webcam interviews explore decision making, the various roles that smartphones play in providing customer insights from app usage to location identifiers to omnichannel retailing, Target's "big data", how Key Ingredient used A/B tests to design an effective digital experience, "driving" golfer insights at PING and the increased interest in gaming plus augmented and virtual reality opportunities.