Exam 7: Marketing Research, Decision Support Systems, and Sales Forecasting

Sales analysis is one of the most costly, but least important, sources of marketing information.

Subway introduces a new line of vegetarian sandwiches in 20 locations in Southern Ontario for a six-month period.If the product and promotional efforts behind it are successful, the company may launch the sandwiches nationwide.What type of research is being conducted to determine potential success?

In research studies using the observation method, researchers view the overt actions of the subjects.

What type of firm is a marketing research firm who contracts with clients to conduct complete marketing research projects?

If you wanted to use a quantitative forecasting method that could be used to forecast sales of new products, what method would you select?

What is the final step in the marketing research process?

In a cluster sample, areas or "clusters" are selected from which respondents are drawn.It is an expensive form of sampling and is not recommended unless absolutely necessary.

A logical place to start in identifying a marketing research problem might be to evaluate the firm's marketing mix elements and target market, particularly if any of these had been changed recently.

Researchers rarely use an entire population for a study because it would be too costly and would also become a census.

What underlying assumption is the danger of using trend analysis?

Define a Marketing Information System (MIS) and discuss its importance to marketing managers.

A population and a universe are two marketing research terms that mean the same thing.

What technique uses statistical computations as the bases of sales forecasts?

Trade associations represent excellent sources of private data for particular industries, but these data are rarely made available to marketers.

Most businesses will extensively test-market long-lived, durable goods because of the major financial investments required for their development.

What is a hypothesis? Do all studies need to test a specific hypothesis?

When a firm examines the profitability of particular customers on the basis of sales produced and costs incurred to generate those sales, external sources are the best source of information.

Firms usually decide whether to conduct a marketing research study internally or through an outside organization based on cost, reliability, and accuracy of the data collected by the outside firm.

Guitar Centre hypothesized that because of changing music trends, acoustic guitars would no longer be a best-selling item.This represents the first stage of the exploratory investigation process.

When Revlon cosmetics examines its expenses for tasks such as warehousing, advertising, and delivery in order to determine the profitability of particular territories and products, the company is performing sales analysis.