Marketing Essays - Market Research Methodology Chapter 4
Chapter 4 – Methodology
4.1 Introduction
A marketing research can be classified as exploratory or conclusive. For this research it will be used the exploratory method in order to have deeper understanding about the problem and to discover the variables that need to be considered. The primary objective of exploratory research is to provide insights into and understanding of marketing phenomena (Malhotra, Birks 2006).
To start to understand the problem suggested in this work, secondary data will be collected and after that, for collecting the primary data it will be used both methods of research, qualitative quantitative. The first method will be the qualitative approach because, being an exploratory tool, it will give the researcher a richer understanding about the problem. According to Gordon and Langmaid (1988) qualitative research is extremely helpful in describing complex and detailed behaviour, this is properly for this work as it is dealing with consumer behaviour in the tourism market.
In parallel with the qualitative interviews a survey with close ended questions will be conducted, this is the quantitative approach. Quantitative research is techniques that seek to quantify data and, typically, apply some form of statistical analysis (Malhotra, Birks 2006). The quantitative research will provide statistics numbers for the researcher about the information’s related to the nature of the research. The survey will be conducted in personal face-to-face street interviewing, once that is the easier method to approach a larger number of people and the interviewer can have some control about his sample.
4.2 Research Objectives
The research plan is based on de objectives of this dissertation. The objectives of this research are the following:
- To measure if and how much is the influence of travel programmes about decisions on tourist destinations on consumer
Depending on several criteria, television travel and tourism programmes might exert different levels of influence on the consumers. The decision that a British consumer takes about a destination may be inspired from something that he saw on television for example. Apart from the destination, he might also be influenced about a holiday package or about the season he will decide is the best time to visit.
The question that I aspire to answer is how much the British consumers are influenced by television travel programmes for tourist destinations and to measure the impact that they have on the consumers. Also I want to apply my findings on the AIDA and DAGMAR models and find out how these programmes can influence the Attention-Interest-Desire-Action of the consumers.
- To analyse the way that consumers perceive what they are seeing on these travelling programmes.
In this part I will try to find whether the British consumers are positively or negatively influenced by travel programmes in making decisions about travelling, and to what extend.
Moreover, my purpose is to explain if the form in which the information is passed affects the impact on the viewers and whether the programmes are considered to be reliable or not. The general attitude of the viewers towards destinations on travel programmes will be examined. Finally I aspire that some conclusions and recommendations about what should change in order to this kind of programmes to be more reliable and the consumers to be more affected by them.
- To check if travel programmes are perceived as an informative tool or just entertainment.
Some of the consumers may perceive the travelling programmes of the television as a means via which they can acquire information about destinations and be influenced by them. They may depend on them in order to decide about a place, according to the information that they will collect from the television.
On the other hand, other consumers, even subconsciously, may perceive them as just a means of entertainment, without taking advantage of the information they could collect from them.
What I will try to find out in this dissertation is whether consumers perceive the television to be a means which they can use to acquire information that might influence them in the decisions they make about destinations, or a means of entertainment that they watch just for fun and may not always take into account.
4.3 Data Collection Procedure
4.3.1 Secondary Data
In order to acquire the necessary data books and journals related to the media and the tourism were used, which provided the researcher with the necessary information about the relative fields. Also the researcher had been reading magazines, newspaper and watching travel programmes frequently, in order to be updated in the matters of travel and tourism and how it is presented for the potentials consumers.
The information that were collected from a variety of sources such as the publications that have been mentioned before (in the literature review), were used and analysed in combination with the primary data findings for the purpose of the dissertation.
The secondary data contributed to the researcher’s solving the objective related to the consumer’s perception about what they see in travelling programmes of the British television and what consumer’s behaviour is when it comes to this topic.
4.3.2 Primary Data
4.3.3 The Technique
The primary data was collected through qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research was used because it is an exploratory tool and the research aspires to analyse the influence of the British television on the potential tourist’s decisions and to find out whether they use tourism programmes as an informative or as an entertainment tool.
In order to collect the qualitative data it will be conducted personal face-to-face semi-structured in-depth interviews. This method was chosen because, unlikely the focus group, in a personal interview the person doesn’t feel pressured or intimidated by others given more spontaneously their opinions, beliefs and attitudes toward the topic.
In-depth face-to-face interviews have been conducted from across section of 10 people that live in United Kingdom, and more specifically in London, and are adults so they take destination decisions.
The rationale behind this choice of method is that the fact that there would be one single respondent in each interview and this would give wider insights into the respondent’s opinion. This method also prevents any noise coming from a group providing an insight into the consumer vocabulary witch underpins rational beliefs (Gordon and Langmaid 1988).
Moreover, the face-to-face interview contributed to a calm atmosphere which helped the interviewees to be concentrated and organise their ideas which they had to express. The last reason justifying this choice is related with logistics as it was more practical to organize in-depth interviews rather than trying to manage a focus-group.
The quantitative data will be gathered through a self-completion close-ended questionnaire. The survey will be conducted in personal face-to-face street interviewing, once that is the easier method to approach a larger number of people and the interviewer can have some control about his sample.
The qualitative and quantitative research contributed to the collection of the data that is finally illustrated and analysed in the next part. From the collected data it was expected that some conclusions would be reached relevant to the objectives mentioned before.
4.3.4 Research Sample
According to Malhotra and Birks (2006) sampling is a key component of any research design, they also say that selecting a sampling technique involves several of a broader nature and sampling techniques may be broadly classified as non-probability and probability. For this work the non-probability sampling technique will be used once that it relies more in the observation and judgment of the interviewer to choose the respondents.
The initial challenge was to collect a representative sample of people to include in the study. This would be people of both sexes that inhabit in the United Kingdom, so that they watch British television, because this dissertation deals with travel programmes contained in the British television.
Moreover, the research was based on people who take decision about destinations and travelling in general, which made children to be excluded from the survey. Therefore, people that constituted the sample would be from 18 years old to above, without setting a maximum limit.
Finally, there were no limits ate their financial conditions and at their vocational and social status, since information gathered from people with different lifestyles would be useful and interesting. Besides, television is viewed from people of different status, consequently people at all status could be influenced by the travel programmes and for that could be used in this survey.
The sample was constituted of 10 in-depth interviews for the qualitative method and 60 questionnaires for the quantitative method. These numbers were selected as representative of the population keeping in mind that all the respondents must have watched a tourism programme for at least once so they can have an opinion about it.
This also consist of a limitation for this part of the work, once it can only be taken in consideration the answers of people who watched, at least once, this kind of programme, which wasn’t very easy to do it.
4.3.5 Selecting the Sample
The strategy for gaining cooperation was some visits to some parks during the summer. The rationale was that the response rate would be very high as many people gather at the parks during this period of the year and usually people have some time available for an interview. Another reason is that in the parks people are relaxed and they can have an easy conversation about what their opinions are on the topic.
Usually the potential respondent would be a person that would seat in the park alone because there would be more possibilities that this person would like somebody to chat with.
The advantage of this approach is that it was time saving and many interviews were conducted in a few days, and this was very important considering the constraints that this research had.
The disadvantage of this approach is that the sample might not have been very representative as all of the respondents are people that live in the capital and this might have an impact in their travelling attitude. However, due to time constraints it was very hard interviews to be conducted in others places as well.
4.3.6 Topic Guide
Concerning the topic guide, it was constituted from open-ended questions. The topic guide contained general questions about destination choosing process of the respondents, their viewer habits, attitudes and perceptions toward destinations in travel and tourism programmes and recommendations.
The topic guide is displayed bellow:
Dissertation topic guide
- Destination choosing process
- When and where was your last holiday?
- How did you decided to go to this destination?
- How do you usually decide on a destination?
- Do you always decide on a destination in this way or do you use other ways? Why/Why not?
- If no, what are the other ways?
- Viewers habits
- What do you do in your spare time?
- Do you watch television?
- What kind of programmes do you watch? Why?
- Attitude towards travel and tourism programmes
- Do you watch, or ever watched, a travel (or tourism) programme?
- What do you think about those programmes?
- Have you ever decided on a destination based on such programmes?
- Would you decide on a destination based on this kind of programmes? Why/Why not?
- If no, what would these programmes need to have or show, in order to persuade you to visit a place?
- Perception towards these programmes
- Do you consider them as just a kind of entertainment show or as proper informative programmes about travel? Why/Why not?
- If it is just an entertainment, does it affect your decisions about travel destinations?
- If it is an informative tool, do you think that those information’s might influence the decisions you take?
- Do you believe that those programmes about travel destinations are reliable? Why/ Why not?
- Recommendations
- If not, what should be improved so that you can rely on them?
The rationale of the first part of the topic guide, the destination choosing process, was that it would introduce the interviewee in terms of the habits of deciding a destination. The second part, viewer’s habits, contributed to some findings about people’s habits on watching television and especially the travel programmes. The attitudes about travel and tourism programmes, would give some information about the power that those programmes have to influence decisions about travel destinations. From the perception towards these programmes, we could derive information about what people believe and perceive about these kinds of programmes. Finally, some recommendations would be made at the last part about any possible ways to improve the quality and reliability and thus increase the influence of these programmes.
The questionnaire for the quantitative survey was made from close-ended questions based on the questions developed for the qualitative research.
4.3.7 Topic guide pre-test
The topic guide was tested before finally tuned; this involved a simulation where a potential respondent was interviewed. Then the redundancies were detected and removed and also some of the questions were re-structured in order in order to the interviewees to understand them more easily.
4.3.8 The Process
During the in-depths interviews a voice recorder was used. A voice recorder was chosen, as this is the most frequently used technique for in-depth interviews. In addition, it doesn’t stress the interviewee as a video camera might do and it is easy to use. Thus, the primary data was collected through recorded interviews and once collected the tapes were transcribed.
The interviews were conducted at the place where respondents would be relaxed and ready to have an easy conversation. As mentioned above, this place was a park. Finally, since this research involved approaching members of the public, it was necessary to adhere to the Code of Conduct of the Market Research industry. Thus, the protection of respondent anonymity was an important consideration and only the initials of each of them were revealed.
The primary data helped to solve the objectives that this research requires. With the primary data the influence of travel programmes about tourist destinations on consumers was measured and it contributed to finding out whether these programmes are used as entertainment or as an informative tool.
4.3.9 Data Analysis
After the primary data has been collected by both, qualitative and quantitative, research it will be use two different analysis methods for analysing the information, one for each kind of research. For the qualitative, after the in-depth interviews and the transcriptions are done, a data reduction will be done taking the information that is important for the research. Then the framework analysis method will be used where, in a spreadsheet, details of each interview is presented in the columns and in the rows the issues that were discussed in the interviews. With this method it will be possible to indentify the similarities between the interviews and get the key information’s on this research.
For the quantitative analysis, the SPSS software will be used, this program will take all the information obtained with the application of the questionnaires and will transform it into numbers and statistics about the sampling interviewed. These information’s will help the researcher to better analyse and understand the results of his research and will provide the reader real numbers about the topic that has been researched in this work.
