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Business Research:

A Discussion of the Basics


and
Information on Ivey’s Behavioral Lab

June Cotte
Marketing Professor
Director, Behavioral Lab
Ivey Business School
Agenda

ƒ Business research and the research


process

ƒ Differences between academic and


commercial business research

ƒ Academic business research at Ivey


Business Research
ƒ Business research is pervasive - basic purpose is to help
managers make better decisions.

ƒ Examples of business research:


ƒ Business and economic research (trends, acquisition or
diversification studies, market share analysis, employee studies)
ƒ Pricing (cost and profit analysis, elasticity of price/demand,
demand analysis and forecasting, competitive pricing)
ƒ Product (concept tests, brand name tests, test markets, package
design studies)
ƒ Distribution (plant/warehouse location studies, channel
performance studies, export studies)
ƒ Promotion (media research, ad research, public image studies,
sales force studies, coupon effectiveness)
ƒ Buying Behavior (brand preference/attitudes, satisfaction,
intentions, segmentation studies)
The Business Research Process

ƒ Formulate a problem

ƒ Determine research design

ƒ Design data collection method and form

ƒ Design sample and collect data

ƒ Analyze and interpret data

ƒ Prepare a report for executives


The Business Research Process

ƒ Formulate a problem:

- Understand your objectives

- What question is the study supposed to answer?

- What information would be needed to answer it?


The Business Research Process

ƒ Determine the Research Design:

- How much is already known?

- Can a hypothesis be formulated?

- What type of questions will need to be answered?

- What type of study could answer these questions?


- Exploratory (literature, focus groups, cases)

- Descriptive (longitudinal, cross-sectional)

- Causal (experiments, both lab and field)


The Business Research Process
ƒ Determine Data Collection Method:

- Can I use existing (secondary) data?

- What is to be measured? How?

- What is the source of the data?

- Should the study be done in person, through the


mail, over the phone, or electronically?

- Should the method be observation, survey, focus


group, experiments, or a combination?

- Should the purpose of the study be known to


participants?
The Business Research Process
ƒ Design Sample and Collect Data

- What is the target population?

- Is a sample necessary?

- How large should the sample be?

- Who will gather the data?

- How much supervision is necessary?

- What methods will be used to ensure the quality of


the data collected?
The Business Research Process
ƒ Analyze and Interpret the Data

- Who will edit and code the data?

- What kind of analytic techniques are necessary?


- Statistical tests?

- Qualitative analysis?
The Business Research Process
ƒ Write up the Report

- Who will read the report?

- What is their technical level of sophistication?

- Are managerial recommendations called for?

- How should the report be structured?


Differences between Academic and
Commercial Business Research
ƒ Academic researchers are often trying to solve more
basic questions than commercial researchers.
ƒ Researchers at Amazon want to know if consumers prefer website
design A over website design B to make a design change decision.
VS.
ƒ Academic researchers might be interested in how consumers read
a website, and how much cognitive effort (brain power) they
spend reading words vs. looking at pictures.

ƒ Researchers at Ford want to know which member of the family


(wives or husbands) has more say in the decision to purchase a
new vehicle.
VS.
ƒ Academic researchers might be interested in the negotiation
strategies married men and women use to “win” arguments.
Academic Business Research at Ivey

ƒ We have researchers working in all sorts of areas, on


many different problems.

ƒ Some researchers, like those in finance, primarily use


secondary data from databases and other sources, and
analyze their data with econometric modeling. They can
answer questions concerning how the stock market
rewards or punishes certain company behaviors, for
example.

ƒ Other researchers, like those in strategy, often use


surveys of CEOs or other top managers, to answer
questions about corporate strategy and decision making.

ƒ Some researchers are interested more in human behavior


at an individual level. This group will do mainly
experimental work, often using students as research
participants.
Research Studies Spring 2005
Pricing Study
ƒ The possibility that consumers can ‘self-attribute’ price levels
(blame consumers in general for prices) and the consequent
impact on price fairness, purchase, and willingness-to-pay is an
unexplored area within marketing despite many studies about
attribution and price fairness.

ƒ In an experimental setting consumers were provided with


information by one of two potential sources (university
professor or company spokesperson). This information led the
participants to believe that they (or the firm, or the general
economic environment) were responsible for the price of a
product.

ƒ We find that consumers’ perceptions of price fairness,


willingness to purchase and willingness to pay are influenced
by the way in which responsibility for the product’s price is
allocated, and by who provides the information on which the
attribution is based.
Research Studies Spring 2005
Corporate Responsibility Study
„ There is a purely economic argument that corporations act
responsibly when they fulfill their fiduciary duty and legal
obligation to shareholders to maximise profits. Put simply, the
argument goes something like this: The income generated by
corporate activities — dividends to shareholders, wages,
salaries and other forms of remuneration to employees and
taxes to government — will stimulate consumption and
economic prosperity. If this economic wealth is distributed
equitably, then social well-being will be assured.

„ There is also an ethical argument that corporations are morally


obliged to “give back” to the societies in which they exist. In
the ethical argument, the corporation’s moral obligations to
society must be considered in all decisions. This research (a
choice-based conjoint questionnaire) is intended to help
develop a tool that will assess which of these arguments are
more persuasive to people (and to which people they are most
persuasive).
Research Studies Spring 2005
Personalization Study
„ This experiment was based on a 2 (participants initially used a
personalized interface versus an interface that was not
personalized) by 2 (after using the initial interface,
participants used a competitor interface for an additional 1 or
6 trials) full-factorial design.

„ This work investigates the power of personalization to create


loyal users of an e-commerce website. Our approach focuses
on the impact that personalization has on consumer learning
and interface loyalty during a series of online flight booking
tasks.

„ We find that website personalization has two important


effects on consumer behavior: (1) it allows the user to
complete the consumption task more efficiently; and, (2) users
are substantially more loyal to a personalized incumbent (i.e.,
the first experienced) interface than to a non-personalized
incumbent interface, once they have had sufficient
experience with both interfaces. they were on the first trial.
Research Studies Spring 2005
Social Influence Study
„ In marketing, it is well acknowledged that members of the referent
group have a strong influence on individual consumption decision;
however, the nature of this influence remains unclear. Two separate
streams of research that examined this issue have produced
conflicting findings. On the one hand, research on normative social
influence posits that a desire to gain social approval and the sense of
inclusion in a meaningful group is a primary goal guiding social
interactions. On the other hand, however, empirical evidence
suggests that people, in fact, believe that uniqueness is evaluated
more favorably by others than similarity.
„ The primary goal of the present study is to reconcile these
conflicting findings. To this end, we conducted an experiment with a
four-cell between-subject design. In all conditions, participants were
presented with a scenario describing an individual who purchased a
laptop. Depending on the cell, this individual was described as
conforming to the group, differentiating from the group, or balancing
conformity and differentiation in two different ways. Researchers
are currently performing a content analysis of these essays.

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