Marketing Research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Marketing Research - Essay Example One of the primary goals of marketing research is identifying and assessing how the varying elements of the marketing mix impact on customer behavior. Marketing research falls into two categories depending on target market: consumer marketing research and business-to-business marketing research. Discussion The marketing research process covers a round of stages such as collection, organization, and interpretation of data. The designing of a research plan is a multifaceted endeavor as it involves decisions such as the data sources to employ, approaches to take, how to minimize distortions to the data collected, the research instruments to employ, the configuration of the sampling plan, methodology, and adherence to research ethics. A marketing research planning process incorporates a series of interconnected stages and each stage has an impact on the stage preceding or subsequent to it. Stages of a Marketing Research Plan Stage 1: Defining Research Problem The first stage in a marketi ng research plan involves identification of the problem or marketing issue (need). This stage comes after review of the business situation (Wild & Diggines 50). The starting phase of the research plan spotlights the reason or the research problem. When defining the problem, the researcher ought to construct an appropriate marketing research design. The problem should not be too narrow but should embrace the pertinent issues that the research seeks to capture. It is critical to obtain coherent insight into the nature, scope, and intensity of the problem prior to the formulation of the problem. The stated problem should reflect the organization’s resources and should be expressed in a manner that plainly identifies the sought opportunity (Housden 71). The problem in this case encompasses positioning of the new phone in the market. Outlining the Research Objective The researcher should justify the need for research as well as defining the objective of the research (Prasuraman & Krishnan 26). Outlining the research objective is crucial and the researcher needs to evaluate what he or she seeks to find out and why. In addition, the researcher should identify the data needed as well as the data sources. This entails scrutinizing the research purpose and highlighting the data required to complete the purpose (Prasuraman, Grewal, & Krishnan 33). Research objective entails goals to be achieved by conducting research. One of the objectives may be exploring some new product in the market. Diverse research objectives lead to diverse research designs (Wild & Diggine 51). Stage 2: Planning Research Design The second stage encompasses determining the research design to be employed. Picking out of the appropriate methodology is crucial to the overall success of the marketing research. The research method to be adopted depends on the research philosophy that has been employed. The designing of the research instrument is also crucial (Zikmund & Babin 51). Stage3: Planning Sample The third stage of a research plan incorporates defining the sample. The identification of the sample incorporates specifying who or which units should avail the data needed (Prasuraman & Krishnan 37). This stage lays the ground for designing of the sample. The stage encompasses instituting a problem solving framework and analytical models guided by the defined audience. The

(Love) ACC 403 SLP 4 Activity Based Costing Essay

(Love) ACC 403 SLP 4 Activity Based Costing - Essay Example The concept of Activity Based costing has its origins in the U.S manufacturing industry, where increases in technology led to a decrease in fixed costs and increase in variable costs and the number of steps in each manufacturing process as the automation process increased. For example, manual labor declined as robotics was introduced in the automotive industry, while the number of mechanistic processes and increased use of machinery meant that depreciation and replacement costs went up. Activity based costing is, as the name implies, based on determining the costs of different activities involved in the manufacturing or production process, and then identifying the costs of each activity (Kaplan & Cooper, 1988). In a company like Apple, there are also a number of activities involved in manufacturing its laptops, PCs and monitors. While traditional accounting takes into account only the cost of activities actually performed, activity based costing also includes the wait time for inventory parts etc. which are also included in overall costs of production. Activity based costing has been used to define re-engineering processes and eliminate unnecessary costs and processes (Kaplan & Cooper, 1988). Activity Based Costing is implemented by first identifying the cost drivers for each activity. Cost drivers are the basis for allocating product costs to the activities performed. Volume and Time are the most commonly used cost drivers (Turney, 2010)- everything else is attributed to a charge that is directly allocated to the activity in question being performed (Kaplan & Anderson, 2007). Volume means units of work or products produced. Time means length of time taken to complete a specific activity. If Activity Based Costing was used at Apple, we could have the following chart for activities performed from Jan 1-Dec 31, 2011: In practice, many difficulties are encountered while