Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Collecting the Information

The data collection phase of marketing research is generally the most expensive and error prone. Some respondents will be away from home, offline, or otherwise inaccessible and must be contacted again or replaced. Others will refuse to cooperate or will give biased or dishonest answers. In order to control costs while maintaining high-quality responses, a company must develop a meaningful sampling and data collection plan.

Sampling Plan

After choosing the research approach and instruments, the marketing researcher must put together a sampling plan designed to obtain high-quality responses while keeping costs in line. This calls for three decisions:

• Sampling unit. The key question here is Whom should we survey? In ...