The business research process provides a roadman with directions for conducting a business research project There are three steps in the research process. They are the formulation, execution and analytical phases. Step 1: Formulation stage – involves defining the substance and process of the research. To Develop: Theory, Research Questions, Hypotheses, and Study Design/ Method. Example: Assume a luxury producer came and sought help from my company which provides business consultation services. He was worried about how to segment the current market.
I would design the research objectives according to the Mason’s hierarchy of needs theory, egg. How many people are there living this area? Their Income level. Their occupation and so on. I would assume that people of certain income level would be interest in luxury goods to show his or her status. The research will be designed especially made for this luxury company. Step 2: Execution phase – researcher is actively gathering information from the appropriate sources. This information is then checked for errors, coded, and stored in a way that allows it to be analyses quickly and conveniently.
Example: After the sign of research is completed, I would send it to the marketing staff to implement the research, check the errors. Then I would transform the research questions into questionnaires, post them online or distribute them to certain areas. After people finished the questionnaires, I would gather all the Information, check for errors, coded them Into SPAS, and analyses right on the SPAS programmer. Step 3: Analytical phase ; data are analyses. Hypotheses are tested and either (a) with the outcome predicted in the formulation stage. Results are examined to provide answers to the key research questions.
The decision maker then take actions based upon better knowledge of the situation. Example: when the data have been analyses, I would test if the hypotheses are supported or not supported. Then make the conclusion. Recent business trends have affected business research in many ways. They have helped shape the types of research performed, the way research is conducted and the phenomena that are studied, as well as the importance of research in business decision-making. Among the more important trends impacting business research are international research, relationship marketing and information revolution.
International research. Firms around the world now perform business research to improve their decision making. This research influences decisions often involving unfamiliar cultures. Internationalization means business research also must take an international focus. Difficult managerial decisions involving consumers and employees in a foreign culture are made even more difficult by an array of communication barriers, both verbal and nonverbal. These decisions require research regarding cultural differences including the ability to translate meaning from one language into the same meaning in another language.
The internet means many businesses now insider the world their market. In addition, translational equivalence which means that text can be translated from one language to another and then back to the original language with no distortion in meaning, becomes essential. Relationship marketing Relationship marketing emphasizes long-term interactions between a business and its stakeholders. The emergence of relationship marketing is changing research in terms of who and what is studied. A principal component of relationship marketing is the realization a firm cannot be everything to everybody.
Otherwise, limited resources will be spent on unprofitable customers. Successful companies have loyal customers, loyal employees and loyal stakeholders. Relationship marketing has placed an increased emphasis on the study of loyalty-related factors. Employee loyalty issues such as turnover and organizational commitment have been studied often because of their relationship to firm performance. Turnover represents the average tenure of an employee and suggests a replacement rate needed to maintain production. Organizational commitment is the degree to which an employee identifies with the goals and values of a firm.
Information revolution The information age has facilitated many research processes. Technological advances in computing and electronic storage have dramatically increased research efficiency. Electronic communications, such as emails, has replaced the telephone and traditional ‘snail-mail’ for many types of business communications, including and data transfer between interested parties. Company information is now stored and catalogued in an electronic format, these electronic data warehouses replace other more costly approaches to storing data. Electronic data warehousing clearly has changed the way analysts and decision makers do their Jobs.
Further, numerous industry statistics are now available electronically. Motivated by the low cost of electronically storing information and a desire to better understand multiple relationships, many organizations have developed formal systems aimed at recording all important events in a database. The resulting database is an electronic representation of organizational memory. Organizational learning can be defined as the initialization of both external and internal information to be used as an input to decision making. One relatively new organization learning tool is data mining.
