MK 8200: Marketing Research

Info

Instructor: Dr. Ramakrishnan
Term: Fall Mini-mester, Remote synchronous

Graduate-level course, but the first (and perhaps only) time students are working with research within the marketing program

Central Concerns

Faculty Concern: Students dislike research classes. There’s more math, and they don’t see it as necessary to their careers. Students don’t like case studies and don’t get invested in them.
LX concern: Concept for this course is a lot of high-stakes testing, not a lot of hands-on exercises.  Synchronous sessions do not seem helpful as lectures

Plan

• Rewrite case studies as a course-long narrative
• Incorporate more hands-on exercises within case study projects
• Use Kialo as a platform for discussion and debate in synchronous sessions
• Use low-stakes quizzes, and one final exam, shifting the weight of the grade onto Case Study responses and discussion participation

Case Studies

Problems:

• Case studies as initially chosen are overly-clinical.
• Case studies take a while to read
• Good marketing case studies often have answers published online
• Don’t present things as if the reader is in a place of decision-making.
• Case studies largely follow decisions of older white men.  That is no longer the truth of the industry, and does not reflect the students in the course.
• Faculty would  like to include more ethical issues within these case studies,
• Faculty would like to include hands-on activities.
• No complete data sets in case studies for students to analyze.

Proposal:  Rewrite case studies as a course narrative.

• Start from selected case studies as written in Modern Marketing Research: Concepts, Methods, and Cases By Feinberg, Kinnear, and Taylor
• Create a cast of characters (company ‘flow chart’) and rewrite case studies as all being from the same company.
• Incorporate selected ethical issues into each case study
• Rewrite questions to include more application of techniques (data analysis, survey design, research planning, etc)
• Incorporating ethical issues into this narrative, and creating hands-on activities that interface with case studies.
• Redesign layout to be more easy to read

Multimedia Design Proposal:

• Redesign case studies as a series of documents (emails, text messages, articles, etc), to help students feel like they’re in a particular position. 
• Use images to tie concepts to fictional people – makes it easier to discuss
• Greater representation of gender, race and ethnicity than in original case studies.
• Accessibility may become an issue

Process Walkthrough

Process Walkthrough Link

Accessibility

Text-only version with annotations available for all students.

Final Case Studies

Click the links below to view the finished case studies.

01-WelcomeToLuster
01-Org Chart
02-Foodi
03-UWA
04-SeigelWest
05-WilsonMills
06-MaeveMagazine
07-ETO
Conclusion iCollege only. Includes student’s name. Three versions created to respond to final exam grade, but only one used.

Synchronous Discussions

Problem:

Finding method for 30-40 students to meaningfully contribute to synchronous discussion.  Wants easy way to assign grades to discussion participation.  Trying to get deeper discussions/answers.  Faculty worried about students just agreeing with each other and only choosing ethical stances.  Wants them to play “devil’s advocate.”

Proposal:

Creation of classroom within Kialo-edu.com to use a debate platform for a more in-depth, easy to grade discussion.

Examples

Subset of discussion

Overview of an entire discussion

Statistics view to assist with grading of participation

Data generation

Problem:  Students need experience working with large datasets to do analysis.  Datasets are available for purchase, but these are often too complex for an introductory level.  Faculty would like datasets to be tied to case studies.  Datasets must allow for students to explore correlation, regression analysis and analyze p values in social science and medical fields.

Proposal:

“Burying Bones in the Desert.”
Software for generation of large datasets seeded randomly, but with imputed correlations and regressions for students to find.  Thousands of records can be generated quickly, and the correlations can be adjusted to meet the needs of a particular case study.  Develop designer/faculty-facing version of software for dataset generation with designed P values.

Version 1

873 records for the ‘Maeve’ case study.  
Correlations: age->number of sexual partners (inverse parabolic), Income->Most important thing (linear).  Additional correlation between gender and age->income.
Record collection mirroring distribution of Cosmopolitan Sex Study from 1982.
Numerical values and categorical values.

Version 2

533 records for ETO Case Study.  Complex regression between multiple variables. 
Bar hours/day and Average Temperature – positive correlation to DUI arrests
AA groups per million – Negative correlation to DUI arrests
All numerical values

Version 3

Two data sets (700-900 records each) for use in extra credit assignment and final exam.  Topics about Crypto investment research and vacation rentals.
3-4 variable regression.  Mix of numerical and categorical data.
Additional correlations between Age->Income,  Age->Number of Children, and Education->Income

Student Responses

“Please, continue create these custom case studies not some standard case packs.”

“it’s very interesting to look at the end-to-end business research”

“Using cases because they apply to the real world, and using the in-class participation tools. It makes class fun and engaging/interesting. ”

“I also love that the case studies are vague and open ended. It really does reflect some situations I’ve experienced on the job.”

“Kialo is awesome! My favorite part of the class and it keeps me engaged. ”

“Continue with Kialo! I like it.”