Global Marketing Research and Analytics

Define marketing research and show how it informs strategic decisions in global markets. Explore globalization's impact on insights, researchers' integration in decisions, and fast data from online questionnaires and international partnerships.

Identify market problems and opportunities, outlining the global marketing research process. Decide between in-house or outsourced research, and collect secondary and primary data to inform analysis, reporting, and recommendations.

Understand primary data: design, collect, and analyze new data for a specific research project. Compare its timely, customizable advantages with costs, sampling, and the need to use secondary data first.

Learn about secondary data and its pros and cons, including online sources and data reliability. Determine when secondary data fits your research needs.

In this exercise, a european fast-food company focusing on sandwiches plans to enter the Chinese market, outlining information needs and data collection methods, while addressing cross-cultural challenges to inform strategy.

Explore qualitative research methods to dig deep into consumer behavior, motivations, and attitudes using observations, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and case studies.

Explore global qualitative research challenges, including social desirability bias in collectivist cultures, access and willingness of respondents, legal and linguistic issues, and ensuring data comparability across countries.

Analyze a real cross-cultural marketing mistake, identify the company and its main error, and assess its impact. Explore how upfront research and qualitative methods could have prevented it.

Observe real human behavior as it occurs, including subconscious actions, while distinguishing direct and indirect methods, disguised and undisguised approaches, and mechanical tools like eye tracking to reveal authentic actions.

Explore mystery shopping within observations by setting objectives, designing evaluation forms, selecting discreet mystery shoppers, and analyzing reports to derive actionable recommendations across cultures.

Focus groups are in-depth, group interviews that enable interaction, exploratory research to generate ideas, reveal customer needs, and explore why people think a product matters, with 6–10 participants.

Assess the advantages and disadvantages of focus groups, such as fresh ideas, observer credibility, generalizability limits, and costs, with online groups enabling global insights yet raising internet and bias concerns.

Explore in-depth interviews as face-to-face, one-on-one qualitative research, contrasting non-directive and semi-structured ideas, guided by a skilled moderator to probe deeply while addressing cross-cultural challenges.

Explore qualitative research methods through three scenarios—Tesco pricing and sign placement, Hilton Hotels attributes driving return and recommendations, and HSBC repayment system perceptions—with cross-cultural considerations and justification of approach.

Learn how quantitative research tests relationships between variables using large samples, surveys, and statistical techniques to measure attitudes, brand preferences, and purchase intent.

Compare personal, intercept, telephone, and internet surveys, weighing pros and cons, costs, response rates, and biases to choose methods for global market research.

Explore quantitative secondary data sources like World Bank and census data, often free, to reveal patterns across subgroups by age and location. Analyze spending in housing, education, and health care.

Explore measurement and scaling in marketing research, learning how scales capture constructs like brand attitude and purchase intent to inform where to invest and which markets to enter.

Learn how to define a construct and build a corresponding scale to quantify it, using cosmopolitanism as an example, and review nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio, and logarithmic scales.

Explore scales for quantitative questionnaires, including continuous, Likert, bipolar semantic differential, stable, paired comparison, rank order, and constant-sum. Learn to choose simple, reliable scales for marketing research and perceptual mapping.

Explore the difference between reliability and validity in measurement scales for quantitative research, including Cronbach's Alpha, and learn how reliable yet invalid scales mislead findings.

Explore measurement error in research, distinguishing systematic and random errors, and learn how discrepancies between true and observed measurements affect data, surveys, and global marketing research.

Explore global measurement challenges in designing scalable international surveys, weighing standardized versus country-specific scales, ensuring semantic equivalence, and mitigating response bias for valid cross-country results.

Master the essentials of survey and questionnaire design by defining research questions and objectives, selecting online or in-person data collection methods, crafting and pretesting questions, and ensuring ethical approval.

Master open-ended and closed-ended question types, including Likert scales, and learn how precise wording affects data validity. Use pilot testing, existing scales, and single-issue questions to design efficient, neutral questionnaires.

Define the target population, identify the sampling frame, select a sampling method, and determine sample size to gather representative data, while contrasting probability and non-probability sampling and noting generalizability.

Explore probability sampling methods, including simple random, systematic, cluster, and stratified sampling, with clear examples to design representative marketing research samples.

Explore non-probability sampling methods such as convenience, judgment, quota, and snowball sampling to gather data when respondents are easy to reach or hard to recruit.

explore the key global survey challenges and biases—translation equivalence, administration methods, self-selection, non-response bias, social desirability, common method variance, and measurement variance—and learn strategies to ensure data quality across markets.

Analyze the Apple iPod case questionnaire to evaluate if it answers key research questions, identify issues, and propose improvements; compare survey methods and sampling approaches to recommend the best option.

Explore big data’s volume, velocity, and variety, and how it reveals patterns, customer buying trends, and subgroups for rapid, data-driven decisions that shape marketing.

Explore the diverse sources of big data—from smartphones with location indicators to search engines, streaming services, gaming, GPS, travel apps, and banking data—and how data mining enables targeted marketing.

Big data users include consumer products companies, retailers, governments, pharmaceutical and credit card firms who analyze consumption, travel, health patterns by zip code to target offers.

Examine how big data enables targeted marketing, real-time pricing, and personalized recommendations to boost the customer experience. Explore examples from Macy's, Walmart, RFID and GPS-driven deliveries.

Explore how big data is collected across a daily routine and who benefits, with a global perspective on marketing research and analytics.