This course addresses the questions of when and how organizations should gather marketing intelligence for marketing decision making and covers topics such as problem definition, research design formulation, measurement, research instrument development, sampling techniques, data collection, data interpretation and analysis, and presentation of research findings.

The course is a comprehensive, practical presentation of the field of marketing research as an aid to managerial decision making. Accordingly, it is designed for prospective users of research results (i.e. aspiring marketing managers) rather than for specialists in marketing research. The rationale for potential users to study the "how" of marketing research is twofold. Firstly, the more one is aware of the tools of marketing research and their strengths and limitations, the more realistic will be the demands placed upon those responsible for the marketing research function. Secondly, the more one knows of proper marketing research procedure, the better one will be able to judge the quality of the performance of the marketing research specialist(s), and thereby, the degree to which one may rely on the results.

Following an introduction to qualitative and quantitative research methods, students form teams and choose a marketing research project, formulate research hypotheses, collect secondary and primary data, develop a database, analyze data, write a report, and present findings and recommendations.

In this course students will learn to: 

• Translate a marketing problem into a feasible research question

• Design and execute a basic survey research project

• Develop skills in focus group interviewing

• Design questionnaires

• Using appropriate qualitative and quantitative market research techniques

• Use the business world's most ubiquitous spreadsheet package, Excel, to build, analyse and present a set of data

• Write an critical assessment report on research findings using cross-tabulated data

• Present research results

Students are allowed three absences during the semester for whatever reason. There is no need to justify these three absences and they will have no effect on the final grade. Every additional absence after that, for whatever reason, will lower the student’s final grade by one grade level (e.g., a final grade of a B+ would be lowered to a B and so on).