Question

Write on the Five-Step Marketing Research Approach detailing how you will use each step to solve the membership issue the local nonprofit charity is facing.

Address the following in your role as marketing manager:

Scenario: You are the marketing manager for a local nonprofit charity whose funding is based on membership fees. You've noticed a severe drop in new memberships and a decline in repeat memberships, which is threatening your organization's ability to survive and grow. You have decided to implement the Five-Step Marketing Research Process to help understand the problem and create solution strategies to implement.

Define the Five-Step Marketing Research Approach and discuss the importance of research in marketing.

Describe each step of the Marketing Research Approach (one section for each step) in detail including its goal, and create an example aligned to the scenario above to illustrate how that stage would be implemented toward the problem's solution.

Define the two types of research data this process gathers. Share examples of each type that would be useful in solving the scenario.

Compare and contrast the Five-Step Process with two alternative methods for conducting marketing research. What are the pros and cons of each?

Define what it means to differentiate a service and provide an example to illustrate how the local nonprofit charity in the scenario can use the strategy to help increase target market interes

Answer 1

Define the Five-Step Marketing Research Approach and discuss the importance of research in marketing.

Importance of marketing research:

Marketing research is very important for any business firm which is having products or services. Marketing research can be targeted to answer following questions, which are in tremendous importance of the company with regards to customers.

• What are the competitor’s offerings
• Who is the target audience
• What is the economic status and their willingness to pay of the target audience
• What are the current trends and spending nature of the customers
• Do the customers happy with existing quality of product or service
• Do the customers thinking of shifting to another competitors for the same product or services, if yes what are the possible reasons
• Why new customers are not coming or why existing customers of not continuing
• Does the product or service require more improvements? Then what improvement required?

What is five step marketing research approach:

Following are the five steps in the five step marketing research approach:

• Define the problem
• Develop the research plan
• Collect relevant data and information
• Analyze the data and report findings
• Take action

Describe each step of the Marketing Research Approach (one section for each step) in detail including its goal, and create an example aligned to the scenario above to illustrate how that stage would be implemented toward the problem's solution.

Define the two types of research data this process gathers. Share examples of each type that would be useful in solving the scenario.

Aligning the five step marketing approach to the mentioned problem:

Define the problem and objective: our problem is reduction in the number of memberships of new customers as well as existed customers. So objective of the study is to improve the number of new memberships and to retain the existed members.

Develop the research plan: as we need to know the reasons for the reduction of the number of memberships, we need to get the data to evaluate the reasons.

Here I am proposing to gather two types of research data. One is through the interviewing the existed members and the objective of the interview is to know the following things from the customer.

• Are they happy with current services and any improvement required
• Are they considering any competitor, if yes, what is the difference in service they are observing
• How can we improve the services
• What is the overall satisfaction and feedback from the customers

Second type of research data is through online surveys to the targeted audience. It is to evaluate the reasons for the severe drop in the new memberships.

• What exactly new customers is expecting
• Is our charity is different from others or not
• How do new customers gather information about the charity
• How do they decide to what charity to join

Collect relevant data and information:

Assuming we have interviewed few members of the existed members of the charity and took the surveys from the potential customers and got the all relevant information that is required as mentioned in the plan.

Analyze the data and report findings:

I am assuming we have got the information in very structured manner and after thorough analysis, we have found out two reasons for the decrease in number of memberships.

1. The activities conducted by the charity are outdated and not more interested by any existing customers
2. Poor rating of existed customers in online platform causing the severe drop in the number of new memberships.

Take the action: as per the key finding charity needs to revise the activities it is conducting for the members of the charity. Decisions can be taken from the suggestion of the members only.

Compare and contrast the Five-Step Process with two alternative methods for conducting marketing research. What are the pros and cons of each?

Two alternatives for market research, I am considering are personal interviews and surveys

Pros of the personal interview:

• Empathy and personal interaction with the customers
• Capture of non-verbal cues, which gives further conclusions about customers answers
• Experiencing the product/services in real life

Cons of the personal interview:

• Relatively higher cost
• Data processing required
• Analysis required to come up with quantitative figures as we get most is qualitative data.

Pros of surveys:

• Easy to administer
• Less time to develop
• Very cost effective
• Can be taken through different mediums like mobile, laptop, etc.,
• Capability of gathering large number of customers feedback or data
• Structured data gathering (quantitative results)
• Broad range of data collection

Cons of surveys:

• Respondents may not give genuine replies
• Respondents may not care for the survey they are giving

Define what it means to differentiate a service and provide an example to illustrate how the local nonprofit charity in the scenario can use the strategy to help increase target market interests

Differentiate the service: differentiate the service means making our service different to what was being offered in common market i.e., our service should have one unique selling proposition to attract the customers using the same difference. Here the local nonprofit charity should know what type of the services the similar charities are offering in the local area. After studying what all local charities are offering to the customers, our local nonprofit charity can come up with an activity which is nowhere present in the other charity’s offerings.