Marketing Research Methodology

3 Marketing Research Methodology

A well-structured and result-based marketing research is necessary to build up a good basis with useful information for the design of an adequate marketing strategy. The following chapter explains the research methodology used for the information gathering of this thesis.

3.1 Definition of Marketing Research

A basic understanding of marketing research can be reached by combining the definitions of Burns/Bush (2003: 7) and Kotler (2003: 89): Marketing research is the systematic process of designing, collecting, analyzing and reporting data and information that may be used to solve a specific marketing problem facing a company. For further explanations the definitions of the AMA (2004), Aaker/Kumar/Day (2007:

The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the actual level of brand awareness of the location Munich and the overall perception of the brand Star Cooperation resulting in a descriptive research approach. Kamakura (2011: 55) explains descriptive research as a “cross-sectional research” method that has the aim to provide an accurate description of a phenomenon, trend or state-of affairs of a firm. Aaker/Kumar/Day (2007: 80) add that there might already exist hypotheses of a certain aspect however they are mostly of speculative nature. The Star Cooperation assumes that since most of the communication efforts are operated by the headquarter Böblingen the target audience is not aware of the existence of the independent location in Munich. This thesis is used to investigate this

First, identifying omissions, ambiguities, errors in the responses and a lack of corporation is part of the editing process (Aaker/Kumar/Day 2007: 432). The purpose of editing is to make sure that “answers are complete, accurate and suitable for further processing” (Bradley 2007: 329). The next step is to analyze each question by itself counting the number of cases falling into the various categories which is called tabulation (Aaker/Kumar/Day 2007: 436). One useful descriptive method is the absolute and relative frequency distribution where the absolute frequency distribution determines how often a certain response was chosen and the relative frequency distribution indicates the respective percentage of this number of responses in comparison to the total number of responses given to a question (Homburg/Klarmann/Krohmer 2007: 217). Additionally, the mean which is “the average number obtained by dividing the sum of responses to a question by the sample size” (Aaker/Kumar/Day 2007: 438) is used to describe the allocation of responses to a particular question. The allocation of the answers of multiple choice questions is mainly displayed using pie and line charts. The mean is used for showing the average evaluations of certain criteria and the average agreement with pre-defined statements. A content analysis is made for open-ended questions and the answers are analyzed to be