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Chapter 6:
E-Marketing Research
Review Questions
1. What are the three main sources of data for solving marketing research
problems?
2. Contrast primary with secondary data and explain the advantages and
disadvantages of each.
Primary data are information gathered for the first time to solve a particular problem.
Secondary data is collected from publicly and privately generated reports, online
databases, and other sources that have already been collected.
3. Why is a big data a problem for marketers?
Marketers are drowning in data. IBM maintains that every day the world creates 2.5
quintillion bytes of data and much of this is from the online environment. Big data
refers to data sets that are so big that they are difficult to manage with currently
available software. For example, how can a marketer turn 15 terabytes of Tweets a
day into actionable brand tactics?
4. What is competitive intelligence and what are some sources of online CI data?
Competitive intelligence involves analyzing the industries in which a firm operates as
input to the firm’s strategic positioning and to understand competitor vulnerabilities.
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5. Why and how do e-marketers evaluate the quality of information on a Web site?
You can be reasonably sure that the information on a Web site is accurate by
following the procedure listed below:
• Discover the Web site’s author.
• Try to determine if the site author is an authority on the Web site topic.
6. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet for primary and
secondary data collection?
7. Identify the key primary research methods and the appropriate use of each one.
• Online experiments. These attempt to test cause-and-effect relationships. Online
marketers tend to use experiments to test alternative Web pages, display ads, and
promotional offers.
• Online focus groups. Focus group research is a qualitative methodology that
attempts to collect in-depth information from a small number of participants.
8. What is A/B testing and why is this important?
Online, marketers tend to use experiments to test alternative Web pages, display ads,
and promotional offers. This is commonly called “A/B” testing: One group sees a
9. How do marketers turn marketing data into marketing knowledge?
10. What are the 12 channels for online reputation monitoring? Why are they
important to a company?
The 12 channels for online reputation monitoring are as follows: A businesses own
channels (blogs, comment sections, etc), social media and blogs, Google, industry
11. What is real-space data collection? Why is it important?
12. Is data mining possible without a data warehouse? Why or why not?
13. What is cloud computing and how does it help marketers?
14. Give an example of how data mining uncovers new knowledge.
Fingerhut, the $2 billion catalog retailer, used data mining to discover that customers
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15. Identify the steps in a primary marketing research project.
Discussion Questions
16. Purina story: Review Exhibits 6.2 and 6.14. What conclusions can you make
about Purina’s customers and brand based on these and the opening story?
Based on the Purina story and chapter exhibits, one can conclude that in general,
Purina customers were not very interested in clicking on banner ads. However, their
17. Purina story: Classify each of the research methods used by Purina, using
concepts from the chapter.
In this case, Purina began its research by drawing upon two large online panels: 1.5
18. What online research method(s) would you use to test a new product concept?
Why?
A myriad of online research methods exist. A few of these Internet-based methods
could include any of the following activities: experiments, focus groups,
19. What online research method(s) would you use to test the brand image of an
existing product? Why?
20. What combination of techniques would you recommend for conducting
competitive intelligence?
21. Of the ethical issues mentioned in the chapter, which are you most concerned
about as a consumer? Why?
22. Can you think of a marketing research technique that could not be supported
online? Explain your answer.
23. What are the current limitations for undertaking market research on the
general population on the Net? How might these be overcome now and in the
future?
24. Given that the cost of sending an e-mail questionnaire to 10,000 people is no
higher than the cost of sending it to 10 people, why would market researchers
bother devising samples if they were planning to undertake some research
online?
25. What do you think a company should do if it receives a Google Alert or RSS
feed showing that customers are speaking poorly about its products?
26. What are the pros and cons of cloud computing?
27. How would you monitor a brand image in the social media?
Beal and Strauss (2008) offer these 12 channels for online reputation monitoring, which
can be used for brand image:
1. Your own content channels—any blogs, comment sections on the company’s
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2. Social media and blogs using Technorati. com alerts and RSS feeds.
3. Google’s network of video, news, groups, and more.