Step-By-Step Instructions

Sales/Marketing (Marketing Research) Day 1
Secondary Research

1. Time line for the project is approximately eleven school days.
2. Teacher gives printout of this week's Department Templates and blank project logs, for each employee in Sales/Marketing/Advertising departments. to CEO. CEO gives material to VP of Sales/Marketing/Advertising. VP distributes the workload among department employees. Each employee fills in their own log with assignments given by the VP.
3. Do secondary research on the Internet to understand the pet market with the emphasis on dogs and dog ownership.
4. Answer the following questions.
5. How many dogs are owned in the United States?
6. What percent of U.S households own at least one dog?
7. Most owners own ____ dog.
8. How many own two dogs?
9. Are there more male or female dogs?
10. What percent are adopted from animal shelters?
11. What percent of dogs are neutered?
12. What is the average yearly cost for basic food, supplies, medical care and training for a dog?
13. How much money is spent on pets in the year 2012?
14. How much is spent for food?
15. How much is spent for over the counter medicine and supplies?
16. How much is spent on vet bills?
17. How much is spent on grooming and boarding?
18. According to the 2011-2012 American Pet Products Association National Pet Owners Survey, basic annual expenditures for dog owners in dollars are?
19. Surgical vet visits?
20. Routine Vet visits
21. Food?
22. Kennel boarding?
23. Vitamins?
24. Travel expenses?
25. Groomer/Grooming Aids?
26. Comment on the following trends in the report
27. Pampering them?
28. Reducing our pets carbon footprint?
29. Going to the Dogs?
30. Hotels and Motels - Pets welcome
31. Shopping for pet products
32. Grooming
33. Today's pet foods
34. High-tech products
35. Programmable feeding devices
36. Costumes and clothing
37. Travelling in the car
38. Personalized items
39. Write a paragraph on the health benefits that pets bring to us.
40. Turn in your report at the end of the day.

Sales/Marketing (Marketing Research) Day 2: Designing the Survey

1. Our company sells high-end, organic, made in the USA dog food, canned and dry, top notch leather leashes and collars, dog beds, dog harnesss for the car, dog toys, dog beds, etc.
2. Our products are meant for the discerning, quality-demanding, value-conscious dog lover.
3. The purpose of our survey is to find the feasibility of which dog items to sell, supplies, toys, grooming services, how to price and promote them, etc .
4. We need some information about potential customers so we can define our target market and design our promotional or marketing mix of Price, Product, Promotion and Place.
5. To obtain the demographic information as to age, income, education, etc., we will include questions seeking that information
6. We will put those questions at the end of the survey.
7. We want the questions to be clearly written so we can derive information like what price should we charge for dry dog food ? ,or how important is it to sell dog toys?
8. Each question must be of a multiple choice in nature so we can measure the output.
9. Open ended questions are much more difficult to evaluate.
10. Our survey will be conducted over the Internet.
11. We will purchase advertising space from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo.
12. When customers click on our Internet ad, they will be asked if they want to participate in our survey.
13. We can offer an incentive, such as cents off or coupons on products that they purchase with us, discounts on dog spas, grooming, etc
14. When the customer is finished with the survey, they will click the submit button and the information will be sent to our company's email account.
15. Let's look at the survey. Remember each question that the customer answers should give us information as to how best and who to market our products to. Designer Dog Survey
16. We need to explain to the person taking the survey, the purpose of our survey in the beginning of the text.
17. A great deal of thought must go into the design of the questionnaire.
18. Does the question tells us what we need to know about how best to market our product line?
19. The survey you are looking at centers around the 4P's in marketing theory. Product, Price, Promotion and Place.
20. Before determining anything, we must first establish that the person answering the survey qualifies as a buyer. Does he or she own a pet? Do they own a dog?
21. If they are not dog owners, we are not interested in their responses to our survey, since they do not qualify as a customer at this time.
22. That is the purpose of questions one and two.
23. Another item that is a qualifying question, is determined by how they answer question 3. If they do not have access to a device with Internet access they will not be able to buy our products online.
24. Of course, if they do not have Internet accessibility, they cannot answer the questionnaire, since if is an on-line survey.
25. The questionnaire was designed to find information about the following things listed below.
26. Place Questions 4, 5, 6, 12, 14, 18 19, 20
27. Product Questions 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, 30
28. Price Questions 7, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31
29. Promotion Questions 15, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
30. Demographic Questions 11, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
31. Comments box - for respondent to add something they believe that we should know,
32. After designing the questions for the survey, we need to give the respondent a choice as how to answer each question.
33. For yes and no or true false questions we use radio buttons to collect information. Only one button can be clicked at a time. If you click the other, the previous one is clicked off.
34. The answers offered are determined by the researcher. Incomes for example, are from the IRS tax brackets. Education levels is pretty straight forward, along with ethnicity, marital status and age.
35. Questions like number 9 go from loving the idea to hating it. The format is that of a Likert scale
36. Other responses given to the respondent on the questionnaire are obtained from your secondary research and show how much you know about the market you are about to compete in.
37. Your assignment is to :
38. Take the questionnaire for yourself, feel free.
39. To get the survey returned to you change the action line in the survey. Use your name and host of email account.
40. <FORM NAME ="surveyForm" method= "Post" Action="mailto:yourName@email.com?Subject= Designer Dog Survey" enctype= "text/plain">
41. "mailto:yourname@youremail.com ?Subject= Designer Dog Survey" enctype= "text/plain"
42. Come up with a list of two questions each for product, place, price and promotion.
43. Come up with at least two additional demographic questions and their responses.
44. Turn these questions and responses available in to your department manager at the end of the day.
45. Printout the survey you completed.

Sales/Marketing (Determining Sample Size) Day 3

1. Our dilemma today in doing the survey involves, how many people do we need to ask to complete our survey and have the results representative of the entire population of dog owners?
2. It would be impractical and costly to ask all dog owners
3. The answer to that question is influenced by a number of factors, including the purpose of our study, the population size of dog owners, and the risk of getting an unrepresentative sample.
4. We also need to account for sampling error.
5. In addition to the above factors, we need to consider three criteria to determine the appropriate sample size.
6. Level of precision - sampling error is the range in which the true value of the population is estimated to be. This is often expressed as a percentage. For example, ± 5 percent in a survey of who should be president. If our findings are that one candidate is favored by 70% of the voters, then we can assume that between 65% and 75% are in favor of that candidate.
7. Level of confidence or risk. When a population is repeatedly sampled, the average value of the attribute obtained by those samples is equal to the true population value. The values are distributed normally about the true value, called the mean. Some will have a higher value and some results will have a lower value, In a normal population, 95% of of the survey values are within two standard deviations of the mean. This means that if a 95% confidence interval is chosen, thet 95 out of 100 samples will have the true population value. You can increase the validity of your study by increasing the confidence level to 99% or lowering it to 90%.

1. The degree of variability in the attributes or concepts being measured, refers to the distribution of attributes in the population. The more hetergenoous a population, the larger the sample size is required to obtain a given precision. The more homogenous a population is, a smaller sample can be taken. A proportion of .5 indicates the maximum variability if a population. It is often used in determining a more conservative sample.
2. To come with an estimate of variability, simply take a reasonable guess of the size of smaller concept you're trying to measure. For example if you estimate that 30% of the population buys their dog food at a pet store and 70% does not then your variable would be 30%
3. If degree of variability is too difficult to determine, use 50% as the degree of variability. This is a conservative approach.
4. There a number of ways for determining sample size:
5. Using an actual census - looking at all members in a population
6. Use a sample size of a similar study
7. There are published tables that tell you what sample size to use based on confidence level and precision levels.
8. You can use a number of formulas to determine sample size.
9. Our study is attempting to decide how many people will buy our dog products, how much will they spend on their dog, where do they shop for dog supplies, etc.
10. For our study we will use the formula approach. The variables in the formula are included in the sample size calculator.

Sales/Marketing (Probability) Day 4

1. Probability is will a specific event occur and how certain are we that the event will occur.
2. The certainty that we adopt can be described in a numerical measure and the number is located between 0 and 1. Zero occurrences means no chance and 1 means every time.
3. For example, the probability of flipping a coin and getting heads is 50%. We assume that after flipping the coin 100 times, that in the long run, we will get 50 heads and 50 tails.
4. The more times we flip the coin the better chance we have of getting that probability.
5. Use the Coin Toss Program to answer the following questions.
6. Flip the coin 5 times. How many heads? How many tails?
7. Press Back button on browser. Click coin toss link again to reload the program
8. Flip the coin until heads and tails are equal. What is this number?
9. Press Back button on browser. Click coin toss link again to reload the program
10. Click the toss button 100 times. What are the percentage of heads? and percentage tails tails?
11. Turn in your answers to your instructor.
12. Probability theory is applied in everyday life in risk assessment reliability.
13. The lottery relies on probability theory. Lottery officials calculate the probability of one person getting all the numbers right. The odds are stacked in favor of the lottery folks and your chances of winning millions of dollars is very slim.
14. Slot machines are calibrated using probability theory. Casinos want to have just a few big pay outs and take in much more money than they ever pay out.
15. We will use probability in the next day's assignment as it relates to random numbers. Any particular number has and equal chance of being chosen.
16. We will use random number assignment to determine which of our surveys to examine to determine target market and marketing mix elements.

Sales/Marketing (Random Sample) Day 5

1. A simple random sample is similar to putting the names of all students in your school in a hat, and then drawing 300 names.
2. A more scientific approach is to use the computer to select these students from the list of all students.
3. There many companies that will sell targeted mailing lists of dog owners and lists for many other categories.
4. We could have the list include all dog owners in the United States, or California
5. These lists would be huge and costly to sample.
6. If we take a county that we believe is representative of the whole country, then we can expedite the process and reduce the cost.
7. Some companies even update these lists on a regular basis.
8. In Santa Barbara County, for example, there are 88,410 people
9. There are 2.5 persons per household
10. If we divide the population by 2.5 we get 35,364 households.
11. 63.2% of households in Santa Barbara County own a dog.
12. Next multiply we by .632. We get 22,350 households with dogs in Santa Barbara County.
13. These are the people we are interested in interviewing or including in our survey.
14. To get a list of these people, new start-up companies would be wise to get a list containing these individuals.
15. We want to take a random of sample of these 22,350 dog owners that represent this population
16. The response rate to your survey is dependent on a number of factors
17. How long the survey is.
18. Respondents should be able to quickly answer the questions and the survey should not take more than ten or fifteen minutes to complete
19. if you promise the respondents a copy of the results, that will increase response rate.
20. Brand loyalty and brand recognition influence response rates.
21. One of the biggest reasons to answer an on-line survey is the compensation received.
22. What are you going to give them as an incentive if they complete the survey?
23. Follow up e-mails encouraging the respondent to complete the survey are also effective in increasing response rate.
24. It has been shown that such follow up letters increase participation 25%.
25. You as the market research person, should draft an e-mail asking respondents to go to the web site listed in the email and answer the survey.
26. Remember, include some pictures, your logo, contact information and the URL of the web site where the survey resides,
27. Turn the e-mail into your department head at the end of the day.
28. Normal response rates to on-line surveys depend on a number of factors. For this lesson we will assume that we received 45% of the 22,350 surveys or 10,057 responses.
29. 45% for a survey of this type is an excellent return rate. Other rates vary from 20% to 30% based on a number of factors listed above.
30. Here is what the response looks like for our survey.
31. Take out a copy of the actual survey to compare it to the answers

• Determine sample size. Click on Sample Size link.Sample Size Calculator
• In our case we are want a 95% confidence interval ±5% with 50% odds of people buying our product.
• Once we have found the number in our sample, we need to determine which of these in the population should to be surveyed.
• Click on the Random Number Generator link to get a list of numbers equal to the sample size.
• Random Number Generator Program
• Since we have a 10,057 returned surveys, click on the 10,000 radio button
• Click the Random Number Generator Button, the number of times equals to your random sample number - 271.
• You will notice that each click is kept track of for you.
• Write down these numbers or key them into Excel.
• If you want to key them into Excel and you have Windows, Open each application then use the Windows key and right and left arrow to put each application on the desktop with both visible.
• Sort them from low to high.
• Follow these steps to sort using Excel.
  1. Select the random number column.
  2. Click the data tab.
  3. Click the sort box.
  4. From the sort drop-down list, select the column you wish to sort by - The random Number column
  5. Select the other column - the record number column
  6. Tell Excel how you want to sort - Lowest to highest
  7. Click OK
  8. Print out your list.
  9. Look for duplicates. There are probably a few. Cross out the duplicate
  10. Our sample can be a few less than 271.
  11. When the surveys come in, batch them in piles of 100.
  12. Cross of the name of the respondent on the list.
  13. Send a follow-up email to those who have not responded.
  14. Write the record number and random number on each survey.
  15. Pull out the 271 of them that have a random number assigned. These are the records we want to use to create files.
  16. We will use the marketing research program to make sense out to the data we have collected.
  17. You are not going to do the previous 9 steps. These lines are for your information only as how to organize the data.
  18. The surveys are ready for you to work with. For simplicity, all records are not included.
  
  

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