Marketing Research Questions on University Retention Rate, Sales Decline, and Consumer Perception

1. Research Design for Increasing University Retention Rate

Part 1:

1. Assume that you are marketing manager of a university. The university wants you to research how to increase the retention rate of the students. Which research design (exploratory, descriptive, and causal) would fit this research situation the best? Defend your position.

2. Assume that you are marketing manager of a cosmetics corporation whose sales have declined by 10% last year. You want to investigate why the sales declined and how the corporation can recover the sales. Discuss your marketing research plan.

3. A soft drink company has invented a bottled coffee drink and positioned it to be a coffee drink of more luxury image than any other competing brands. Design a brand image test experiment that compares this brand to other leading brands to determine whether or not consumers perceive the brand to have the highest luxury brand image. (1) Which experimental design would you select? Defend your position. (2) Assess the internal and external validity of your experiment. (3) Identify and diagram your experimental design. (4) What is the independent variable in this experiment? (5) What is the dependent variable?
4. Write (1) a 3-item Likert scale and (2) a 3-item semantic differential scale of impulse buying, which is defined as “a consumer’s tendency to buy spontaneously, unreflectively, immediately, and kinetically” and viewed as a consumer trait that may produce frequent motivations to buy, even though they are not always acted on.
5. By searching the Hofstra research databases and Internet sources, (1) find and report any three different scales measuring the concept “consumer animosity” (hatred or hostility towards a specific nation). (2) Report their sources such as authors, year, title of the article, name of the journal, volume, number, and pages. (3) Criticize their reliability and validity. (4) Which scale would you think to be the best? Defend your position.
6. Based on the same sources you used for Q6 and/or other sources, discuss (1) causes and (2) effects (= consequences) of consumer animosity. For each cause or effect, report their sources in the same format of Q6.
7. “The best way to improve the response rate of a survey is to shorten the length of the survey.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not? Defend your position.

Part 2

Background: Chanel, a French luxury fashion company, loses a tremendous amount of revenues each year to counterfeits, so it wants to find out what marketing decision or strategy can effectively discourage purchase intention of luxury fashion counterfeits. For such efforts, Chanel plans to conduct causal research by a 2 by 2 experimental design, in which y (purchase intention of luxury fashion counterfeits) depends on X1 and X2.

X1 is decided to be the penalty (e.g., fine) for buying a counterfeit (High and Low) and x2 is not decided yet. X2 is expected to have a significant interactive effect with X1 on Y. In other words, the effect of X1 will be different between high- and low-level of X2. Suggest what specific variable should be X2, and answer the following questions. Note that unlike a few European countries, there is no penalty yet on consumers for buying luxury fashion counterfeits in the U.S. but the Congress is discussing about such regulations against consumers.