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Managerial Marketing and Market Research

Assigment 1
Provide three examples of how marketing research helps marketing personnel make sound managerial decisions.

Example 1: Scarlatte makes shoes. Marketing managers at Scarlatte have noticed a steady decrease in sales over the past three years. During this time, Scarlatte has being selling their shoes in larger discount stores such as Wal-Mart. From in-store interviews of customers shopping for shoes in these stores, marketing managers have repeatedly heard customers mention they were not going to buy Scarlatte shoes because it is too expensive.
An immediate reaction to this situation would have been to consider lowering the price for Scarlatte shoes. But, this would have been a mistake. Then observational research techniques were been used by marketing managers as a means of better understanding consumers and identifying marketing problems. Then, after defining the problem, identifying management objectives, plan the sampling procedure, collecting and analyzing data, the marketers found out that consumers who shopped for shoes in large discount stores were not very knowledgeable about quality shoe fabric and the employees of the discount stores were not adequately knowledgeable to communicate the Scarlatte shoes´s true value. Also, in-stores promotions were not compensating for this lack of knowledge among the employees. Thus, what seemed like a problem with pricing was really a problem with promotion, sales messages and channels of distribution. Then, they could take the best attitude to resolve the problem.

Example 2: The butcher shop EatMeat is located in a large metropolitan city and it is facing a problem with one of its stores. All the others shows profits, but this one, which is located in the County Selam'un Aleykum - an area with high percentage of Muslims. The other butcher shops located in this area are really huge and most of the employees are Muslims. Their sales are not decreasing.