1. 3.7 Market Research for EC
Market research is aimed at finding information that describes the relationship between consumers, products, marketing methods, and marketers in order to discover marketing opportunities and issues, to establish marketing plans, to better understand the purchasing process, and to evaluate marketing performance.

2. Market Research Includes:
Economy
Industry
Firms
Products
Pricing
Distributions
Promotion
Consumer Purchasing Behavior

3. Marketing Research Process
SEE FIGURE 3.6 Page 95
Market Segmentation
Process of dividing a consumer market into logical groups for conducting marketing research decision making, advertisement, and sales.
Improved methods of market research allow marketers to collect, store, and analyze detailed and personal information in a cost-efficient way.

4. Market Segmentation/cont.
Important task is to analyze consumer-product relations.
What product(s) are certain types of consumers likely to purchase?
How are these consumers distinct from those less likely to but a certain product?
Psychographic Information is useful; lifestyle preferences
Data about work, family, hobbies, interests, preferences, etc. but not always reliable.

5. ONLINE MARKET RESEARCH
Frequently more efficient, faster, and cheaper than traditional telephone, mail, or shopping mall surveys
Ability to reach more geographically diverse audiences.
Larger sample size will provide more accuracy and more powerful predictive capabilities
20% to 80% cheaper than other methods; Telephone can cost as much as $50 per response.
Usually is interactive and can help to identify customer preference shifts early.

6. Online Market Research Methods
Can be an efficient vehicle for fast, cheap, and reliable collection and processing of marketing information, including multimedia formats.
Can include one-on-one communcation, surveys on web sites, , moderated focus groups, etc.

7. Online Mark Research Methods/ cont.
Web sites can utilize games, prizes, quizzes, or sweepstakes.
However 8th GVU Survey (1998) claims that 40% of of the information people place on questionnaires is inaccurate or incorrect.
Therefore appropriate design of Web Questionnaires and incentives for completion are critical to validity of results.

8. FACTORS AFFECTING ONLINE SURVEYS:
Style, length, and appropriateness of questions.
Technical issues, like latest computers
Ease and transparency of use
Slow download and processing speed.
Use of cookies – files that attach to a user’s browser to help track Web surfer’s movements online, whether or not consumer is aware (may be unethical or illegal!)

9. LIMITATIONS
Demographics of online surfers may not be a good representative sample.
Skewed towards those with access
May be a self-defining (or defeating) prophecy.
Anonymity may hide t
ruth.

10. Further Methods for Discussion
Data Mining
Automated prediction of trends and patterns
Automated discovery of unknown patterns
Neural Computing
Machine Learning; identify patterns
Intelligent Agents
Autonomous specialists that learn by sensing an environment