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Marketing Intelligence Marketing Research

1. Ongoing process 1. Project based on information gap
2. Usually done in-house 2. Mostly outsourced to M.R. companies

3. Not meant for immediate action 3. action oriented

4. General Purpose 4. Very specific answers to questions
5. Focus on competition, environment 5. Focus on customers, influencers etc.

Difference between MI and MR

Research Designs :

Exploratory, Descriptive and Causal

Questionnaire Design: A customer centric approach

Designing Questionnaires for marketing research:

1) Language : What language is the respondent going to understand and respond in?

2) Difficulty level: avoid marketing jargons or difficult words unless the respondent is a
post graduate

3) Fatigue : stick to necessary questions. Don’t ask unnecessary questions. Use the KISS
principle . Maximum time should be around 20 minutes.

4) Cooperation with researcher: questionnaire must also encourage the respondent to

respond.

5) Ease of recording:
It must be remembered that when designing the questionnaire, that
it has to be carried on the field and data must be recorded on it.
The questionnaire design should ensure
• It is easy to carry,
• Visible in different kinds of light,
• The distance between different answer categories should
be sufficient so that there is no confusion or mistake while
placing a tick over the actual response for a given question.
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6) Social Desirability bias:

There is a tendency on the part of respondents to give wrong, but
“socially acceptable” answers to even the most ordinary , innocuous questions.
For e.g. , the socially desirable answer to the question “ Do
you read the daily paper ?” is “Yes”. It is as likely to be wrong as right.
There are many ways to verify the accuracy of responses
and to deal with them.
Some of the techniques are

a) Repeating the same or similar question in the questionnaire at different places.

b) Asking indirect questions

c) Asking follow-up questions to probe if the respondent is really truthful.

E.g. the respondents should be asked to state one important headline, or describe
one important story he remembers, if he states that he reads the daily newspaper.

Sequencing of questions:

• questions should appear in a sequence starting from non-threatening or ice-

breaking or introductory questions and then proceed to the main body of
questions.
• Generally age; income, occupation, education and similar demographic
questions should appear at the end of a questionnaire, after an interviewer has
established rapport or familiarity with the respondents.
If these are asked in the beginning, there is a high likelihood of suspicion
and non-cooperation.

8) Biased and leading questions:

The questions should be carefully worded to avoid bias. It is not a good
practice to ask questions such as “ Don’t you think liberalization is a good idea?”.

The better question to get unbiased reply is “ Some people think liberalization is a good
thing, and some think it is bad. What do you think?”
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