Market Research Process

Market Research Process Failure Scenario [WLOs: 1, 2] [CLO: 1, 2, 5, 6]

Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum,

Read

• Chapter 2 of the course text, Principles of Marketing

The Scenario

Every year, millions of dollars are spent marketing products (or services) that fail. Companies would love to get all that money back.

Fortunately, you happen to have a functioning time machine that you bought on Craigslist. As a result, you have one chance to fix what went wrong in the marketing research process and convince one of those companies not to spend that money.

We learned that there are five main steps for the marketing process. In Step 2 before marketers decide on the value proposition and the USP and positioning, they need to conduct in-depth market research to gain an understanding of their target market and the consumer behavior (i.e., their needs and wants). The market research process has five main steps that, if not followed correctly, will result in the failure of the marketing plan and, at the higher level, the product or service. You are tasked to analyze one of these failures.

Instructions:

• Investigate and document the story of a famous new product flop (and market research failure).
• Explain how you went back in time to fix it.
• In your initial post include the following:
  • Identify and research a prominent product or service failure.
  • The press loves failures, so you won’t have any problems finding examples. Simply Google it but before writing, read extensively about it and make sure the product failure is related to improper marketing research implementation.
  • List the following: product or service name, the company who marketed it, the year it was introduced, and where it was introduced (particularly if not in the United States).
• Answer the following questions about the market research process:
  • Refer to Section 2.3 Conducting Market Research and Figure 2.5 in the text and the video you watched.
  • What are the steps in a market research process? Provide each step and relate it to your product.
  • Where was the failure in your product’s market research process? Which step was missing, not followed correctly, misinterpreted, or misrepresented?
  • What solution are you going to share with management to correct the gap in the market research process, if you could you go back in time?
• Be sure to use subject headers for each of the questions asked.
  • Review the Level Heading section of Introduction to APA