- A tissue manufacturer that has the fourth-largest market share plans to experiment with a 50 cents-off coupon during November and a "buy one, get one free" coupon during December. The experiment will take place at Target stores in St. Louis and Kansas City. Sales will be recorded by scanners from which mean tissue sales for each store for each month can be computed and interpreted. Construct a valid, simple experiment to assess the cause and effect relationship of the price promotions.
Pick an organization of interest to determine a research question or hypothesis that could be addressed in business research for that organization. Some organizations to consider might be Apple, Google, Netflix, Redbox, or BP. Address the following:
- Provide an overview of the problem you identified.
- What are some research components that could be measured in order to address the research question or hypothesis you identified?
- How might a researcher obtain that information?
- What is an attitude? How does your definition of attitude differ from a business definition of attitude? - Why is it difficult to come to a consensus concerning its definition?
- What are some ways that attitude can be measured? What are the pros and cons of each?
- Which do you think is the most accurate method of measuring attitudes? Why?
Part 1: A manufacturer of MP3 players surveyed 100 retail stores in each of the firm's sales regions. An analyst noticed that in the South Atlantic region the average retail price was $165 (mean) and the standard deviation was $30. In the Mid-Atlantic region the mean price was $170, with a standard deviation of $15. What do these statistics tell us about these two sales regions?
- Hypotheses are tested by using a click-through sequence in a statistical software package. A generalization about a hypothesis is made by comparing it to a significance level, which is a critical probability associated with a statistical hypothesis test that indicates how likely an inference supporting a difference between an observed value and some statistical expectation is true.
- A researcher is asked to determine whether a sales objective of better than $75,000 per salesperson is possible. A market test is done involving 20 salespeople. What types of information might you receive from this type of study? Explain. How might this data be used in the decision making processes in the business?
- Often, researchers are interested in testing differences in mean scores between groups or in comparing how two groups' scores are distributed across possible response categories. A variety of bivariate statistical tests can be used in these situations.
Identify what tests of difference are appropriate in the following situations. Justify your responses.
- Average campaign contributions (in dollars) to a marketing campaign for healthy living for men is to be compared to contributions to such a campaign for women.
- Average contributions (in dollars) to campaigns for healthy living for people who are 20-30 years old, 30-40 years old, and 40-60 years old are to be compared to each other.
- Human resource managers and chief executive officers have responded "yes," "no," or "not sure" to an attitude question. The HR and CEO responses are to be compared.
- One-half of a sample received an incentive in a mail survey while the other half did not. A comparison of response rates is desired.
- A researcher believes that married men will push the grocery cart when grocery shopping with their wives. How would the hypothesis be tested?
- A manager wishes to compare the job performance of a salesperson before ethics training with the performance of that same salesperson after ethics training.
Discuss:
- In the planning of the research design for a nightclub, what research method would be best the Survey, Experiment, Secondary Data study, or Observation and why. What would be the best research method for a restaurant and why?
- How would you begin the sampling process. Would probability or nonprobobility sampling be the best for nightclub and a restaurant. Explain.