Question

In your own words, explain what you see as some of the common problems of preparing a marketing research report. Why should research reports contain executive summaries? What should be contained in an executive summary?

Answer 1

Companies and other organizations use marketing research to manage the risks associated with offering new products and services. Some problems make marketing research costly and produce results of questionable value for the organization.



1.Poor Survey Design

Organizations use marketing research to find out what customers think and what they want. The survey is a direct way of collecting quantitative, or numerical, information and qualitative, or descriptive, information. When there are errors in the survey design, marketing research problems can surface. For example, a company might use a method that is designed to collect a random sample from the target consumer population, but the method is not really random. Therefore, the organization cannot generalize its survey results to represent the target population.

2.Survey Nonresponse

One marketing research problem relates to how the survey is offered to the target population. Marketers design a survey that many customers choose not to respond to. They look at reasons why people don't want to participate, and they might reach conclusions such as the survey takes too much effort or that the incentive for participation is not appealing to respondents.

3.Survey Bias

A survey might include one or more sources of bias. Marketers might believe, for example, that they have created an online survey to appeal to respondents of all ethnic backgrounds, but the survey questions, and even images, might be biased to favor one ethnic group or could offend one or more ethnic groups. A survey's format and content must be acceptable to all audiences from which marketers seek to gather information.

4 Issues with Observation Research

Some marketing research involves observing consumers in action and noting their preferences. Marketers can become intrusive, interfering with a consumer's experience to the point that a consumer feels disgusted and leaves the business site.

An executive summary is the brief introduction to a business plan. It should describe business, the problem that it solves, target market, and financial highlights.

The executive summary is the most important part of a business document. It is the first (and sometimes the only) thing others will read and the last thing you should write. It is simply a brief review of the document, given so the busy people who will read your document know at a glance how much to read and what actions will probably be needed.

The executive summary must be comprehensive enough to present such elements of the main document as purpose, understanding of the problem, scope, technical approach to solving the problem, methods, results of preliminary analyses, and recommendations.

For a Business Plan, which is a type of proposal, an executive summary should include at least one paragraph for each major section following the introduction.