Essentials of Marketing Research, 1/e

Essentials of Marketing Research: A Hands-On Orientation presents a concise overview of marketing research via a do-it-yourself approach that engages students. Building on the foundation of his successful previous titles–Basic Marketing Research: Integration of Social Media and Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation–author Naresh Malhotra covers concepts at an elementary level, deemphasizing statistics and formulas. Sensitive to the needs of today’s undergraduates, Malhotra integrates online and social media content, and provides current, contemporary examples that ground course material in the real world. Features Give students a framework for understanding Essentials of Marketing Research is organized around the well-accepted six-step framework for conducting marketing research, which imparts structure and unifies content. The steps are as follows: 

1. Problem definition 
2.  Approach to the problem 
3. Research design 
4. Field work 
5. Data preparation and analysis 
6. Communicating the research via a formal report 

A six-step process diagram appears in each chapter, showing how the chapter content relates to this framework. One of the book’s strengths is the way it illustrates the interaction between marketing research decisions and marketing management decisions. Each chapter shows how marketing research decisions influence marketing management decisions and vice versa, yielding a highly applied and managerial learning experience. The text shows how marketing researchers apply various marketing concepts and techniques, and how managers implement marketing research findings in order to improve marketing results. The text emphasizes critical-thinking techniques, including Socratic questioning, critical reading and writing, and higher order thinking. A comprehensive case on American Idol highlights these principles. This case, chapter review questions, applied problems, and Internet exercises have been designed based on the guidelines provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Emphasize practical applications A hands-on, do-it-yourself approach imbues the text, affording students opportunities to experience marketing research. iResearch scenarios require students to actually perform research and make their own marketing research decisions and marketing management decisions. This hands-on orientation is further reinforced by cases, online video cases, review questions, applied problems, and Internet exercises. To help students understand the applications of what they’re learning, the text offers comprehensive real-world cases accompanied by actual questionnaires and data. Each chapter of the book contains questions pertaining to the Dell Running case, while the case itself appears toward the end of the book. Additional comprehensive cases, including one on JP Morgan Chase and one on Wendy’s, appear elsewhere in the text. 

A set of videos accompanying the text’s cases is available online. The viewing time for many of these videos is less than 10 minutes, so they can be shown in class conveniently. The solutions to these cases are provided in the instructor’s manual. Live Research: Conducting a Marketing Research Project sections toward the end of each chapter show how to implement one or more live marketing research projects in the course. The approach is flexible and can handle a variety of organizations and formats. The entire class could be working on the same project with each team working on all aspects of the project or each team could be assigned a specific responsibility (e.g., a specific component of the problem or a specific aspect of the project such as collection and analysis of secondary data). Alternatively, the class could be working on multiple projects with specific teams assigned to a specific project. Foster interest through contemporary content The text achieves a contemporary focus by applying marketing research to current topics such as customer value, satisfaction, loyalty, customer equity, brand equity and management, innovation, entrepreneurship, return on marketing, relationship marketing, sustainability and socially responsible marketing. Extensive integration of social media throughout the text commands student interest and gives prospective researchers the experience they will need. The text presents social media as an application of marketing research as well as a domain through which marketing research can be conducted.