Page 140 - Foundations of Marketing

Marketing Research and Information Systems | Chapter 4 107

Table 4.4 Guidelines for Questionnaire Introduction

• Allow interviewers to introduce themselves by name.

• State the name of the research company.

• Indicate that this questionnaire is a marketing research project.
• Explain that no sales will be involved.

• Note the general topic of discussion (if this is a problem in a “blind” study, a statement
such as “consumer opinion” is acceptable).

• State the likely duration of the interview.

• Assure the anonymity of the respondent and the confi dentiality of all answers.
• State the honorarium, if applicable (for many business-to-business and medical studies,
this is done up-front for both qualitative and quantitative studies).

• Reassure the respondent with a statement such as, “There are no right or
wrong answers, so please give thoughtful and honest answers to each question”
( recommended by many clients).
Source: Reprinted with the permission of The Marketing Research Association.

filings and past marriages. This information has allowed companies to predict customer
behavior and life changes more accurately, but many feel it infringes upon consumer pri-
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vacy. For instance, when consumers visit retail sites online, companies collect data on their
purchases and what they view. Many companies use this to their advantage. For instance,
Amazon, Netflix, and eBay all use data to provide customized recommendations based on
customers’ interests, ratings, or past purchases. Companies such as Capital One Financial
use data collected by firms that specialize in tracking consumers’ online behavior. While
such data enable companies to offer more personalized services, policy makers fear that it
could also allow them to discriminate against consumers who do not appear to be “valu-
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able” customers. Many consumers also believe that their online behavior could be used to
identify them personally. Google, for instance, collects and stores data from individual users’
searches. These search queries are kept indefinitely, although Google claims that the data is
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“anonymized” after 18 months.
International Issues in Marketing Research

As we shall see in Chapter 8 , sociocultural, economic, political, legal, and technological forces
vary in different regions of the world. These variations create challenges for the organizations
that are attempting to understand foreign customers through marketing research. While the
marketing research process is generally the same around the world, some regional differences
exist. To make certain that firms are sufficiently aware of global and regional differences,
many companies retain a research firm, or at least a researcher, with experience in the country
of interest. Most of the largest marketing research firms derive a significant share of their rev-
enues from research conducted outside the United States. For example, the Nielsen Company,
the largest marketing research firm in the world, is a U.S. company but has a market presence
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in over 100 different countries.
Experts recommend a two-pronged approach to conducting international marketing
research. The first phase involves a detailed search for and analysis of secondary data to gain a
greater understanding of a particular marketing environment and to pinpoint key regional issues
that could affect primary research data. Secondary data can be particularly helpful in building

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