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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.