Company Scenario: The following scenario will be used throughout the course for your Key Assignment.

You have been hired by Acme Wholesaling, Inc. to provide research to determine the likely success of a new product that it plans to market. Acme Wholesaling, Inc. wholesales various garments and accessories through street vendors in New York City. These items include umbrellas (for when it rains) and hats, gloves, and scarves (for when it is cold). The street vendors are small-time retailers that resell these items to the public. Many of these vendors establish their carts in Central Park and other park grounds in Manhattan.

An employee of Acme Wholesaling, Inc. has come up with an idea involving the sale of picnic blankets through these vendors for when the weather is nice and people want to sit out in the park. Acme Wholesaling, Inc. has a manufacturer lined up who will make these blankets in wool and cotton blend in various sizes, depending upon the order from Acme Wholesaling, Inc. The company would then resell these to the vendors. Although the ultimate consumer of these blankets is the individuals in the park, Acme Wholesaling, Inc. does not deal with them directly. They work solely through the street vendors.

Your job is to provide enough validation for the idea that Acme Wholesaling, Inc. can convince the street vendors to carry this new product on their carts.

The management of Acme Wholesaling, Inc. has asked you, as a preliminary to the research project, to prepare a memorandum that describes marketing research as a concept and the process of marketing research. In this memo, you should include the following:

• Explain why marketing research is necessary to a firm that sees itself as "marketing solutions to customer needs."
• Discuss how the research that you plan to undertake would harvest data and transform them into information.
• Describe the distinction between descriptive, exploratory, and causal research. Which you plan to undertake?
• Create an outline of the steps in the research process, and explain why each one is important in the sequence that you set out. 

Set up at least 2-3 research questions that you feel need to be answered by your research project to properly predict the likelihood of success of the Acme Wholesaling, Inc. product venture. These questions should be worded as such, and they can be either closed-ended or open-ended. Explain briefly why you think each question is so critical to the success of the venture.