Salient Features
"Give students a framework for understanding
Essentials of Marketing Research is organized around the well-accepted six-step framework for conducting marketing research, which imparts structure and unifies content. The steps are as follows:
1. Problem definition
2. Approach to the problem
3. Research design
4. Field work
5. Data preparation and analysis
6. Communicating the research via a formal report
A six-step process diagram appears in each chapter, showing how the chapter content relates to this framework.
One of the book's strengths is the way it illustrates the interaction between marketing research decisions and marketing management decisions. Each chapter shows how marketing research decisions influence marketing management decisions and vice versa, yielding a highly applied and managerial learning experience. The text shows how marketing researchers apply various marketing concepts and techniques, and how managers implement marketing research findings in order to improve marketing results.
The text emphasizes critical-thinking techniques, including Socratic questioning, critical reading and writing, and higher order thinking. A comprehensive case on American Idol highlights these principles. This case, chapter review questions, applied problems, and Internet exercises have been designed based on the guidelines provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
Emphasize practical applications
A hands-on, do-it-yourself approach imbues the text, affording students opportunities to experience marketing research. iResearch scenarios require students to actually perform research and make their own marketing research decisions and marketing management decisions. This hands-on orientation is further reinforced by cases, online video cases, review questions, applied problems, and Internet exercises.
To help students understand the applications of what they're learning, the text offers comprehensive real-world cases accompanied by actual questionnaires and data. Each chapter of the book contains questions pertaining to the Dell Running case, while the case itself appears toward the end of the book. Additional comprehensive cases, including one on JP Morgan Chase and one on Wendy's, appear elsewhere in the text.
A set of videos accompanying the text's cases is available online. The viewing time for many of these videos is less than 10 minutes, so they can be shown in class conveniently. The solutions to these cases are provided in the instructor's manual.
Live Research: Conducting a Marketing Research Project sections toward the end of each chapter show how to implement one or more live marketing research projects in the course. The approach is flexible and can handle a variety of organizations and formats. The entire class could be working on the same project with each team working on all aspects of the project or each team could be assigned a specific responsibility (e.g., a specific component of the problem or a specific aspect of the project such as collection and analysis of secondary data). Alternatively, the class could be working on multiple projects with specific teams assigned to a specific project.
Foster interest through contemporary content
The text achieves a contemporary focus by applying marketing research to current topics such as customer value, satisfaction, loyalty, customer equity, brand equity and management, innovation, entrepreneurship, return on marketing, relationship marketing, sustainability and socially responsible marketing.
Extensive integration of social media throughout the text commands student interest and gives prospective researchers the experience they will need. The text presents social media as an application of marketing research as well as a domain through which marketing research can be conducted. The majority of chapters include a separate section entitled "Marketing Research and Social Media" which delves into this key topic. Social media is also discussed in several other sections of each chapter, including the end-of-chapter questions, and all cases and video cases. Major references to social media are highlighted with an icon in the margin.
The text acknowledges the importance of conducting online marketing research in today's marketplace. Malhotra discusses how the Internet can be utilized during each step of the marketing research process and how the concepts discussed in each chapter can be implemented online. Coverage of marketing research via the Internet is fully integrated throughout the text. For example, all the iResearch exercises require the students to perform research online.
Enable student success via learning aids
Extensive self-help tools for students are posted on the open access (no password required) Companion Website. These include a comprehensive Student Resource Manual, SPSS and Excel Demonstration Videos, SPSS and Excel Screen Captures with notes, and more. These resources make the book very suitable for use in both the classroom and online marketing research courses.
The text's extensive resources help students learn and practice SPSS and Excel, anywhere and anytime. Help for running the SPSS and Excel programs used in each data analysis chapter is provided in three ways:
1. Each chapter contains separate step-by-step instructions for conducting the data analysis presented in the chapter in both SPSS and Excel. These instructions are also included in the Student Resource Manual that is also posted on the open-access Companion Website.
2. Videos demonstrating step-by-step instructions for each data analysis procedure—SPSS and Excel—may be downloaded from, or viewed on, the Companion Website (www.pearsonhighered.com/malhotra). These videos may be shown in class, or students may view them on their own time.
3. Screen captures with notes illustrating step-by-step instructions for running each data analysis procedure using SPSS as well as Excel appear on the Companion Website for download.
International Marketing Research sections in eleven chapters help students view concepts in an international setting.
Ethics in Marketing Research sections in each chapter illustrate ethical issues that arise in the course of marketing research. Within these sections, ethics is discussed from the perspectives of four stakeholders: the client, the marketing research firm, the respondents, and the general public.
Research in Practice sections at the top of each chapter present real-world examples of key concepts, describing the kind of marketing research conducted to address specific managerial problems and the decisions made based on the findings.
Research Recipe summaries at the end of each major section recap the main concepts present and provide guidelines on how those concepts may be implemented in actual practice.
Each chapter opens with a set of learning objectives that previews, and piques interest in, the material to come. Then, content from the chapter-opening Research in Practice section is used as a running example throughout the chapter, lending coherence to course material."