Marketing research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Marketing research - Essay Example The primary advantage of using internet as a means to reach target audience is that it is widely accessible; it is very quick in registering responses; it can catch response from a large number of audiences and last but not the least it has reduced the cost of carrying out research (Sekaran, 2006). These primary benefits of using internet as a tool for carrying out research are augmented by facts like: internet has inculcated in small and medium enterprises the habit of conducting or reverting to research when encountering an operational issue; internet has allowed students at various levels to extract information from previous researches and use that information in their own assignments; internet has also allowed researchers to seek responses from individuals who were reluctant to participate in focused group survey. Like these benefits there are other benefits as well of using internet as a means to conduct a research and gather responses. Internet technology has made it possible f or researchers to reach geographically dispersed respondents. It has supporting technologies like video conferencing and instant chant rooms which allows researchers of a field to gather at a place simultaneously, without incurring any cost. This type of research is carried out by means of group ware technology and this method is known as Delphi method. Internet has freed sponsored respondents from the tedious process of registering their responses to the posted mail, containing the questionnaire. Now they simply can go online to fill out the questionnaire in a hassle free manner. However, as mentioned earlier there are some negative aspects of internet, encountered when conducting quantitative or qualitative researches. The most troubling negative aspect of internet research is that it is totally callous when it comes to respecting respondents’ private time, when they do not feel like answering to research question. This is not the only facet of this issue; sometimes online research agencies send questionnaires to respondents without their consent to participate in this research, which leads to respondent’s annoyance. If this scenario is removed from the picture, even then there are a number of problems which can come up, for instance the online questionnaire might not open on the browser used by the respondents. This further leads to respondent’s agitation. Other problems with this form of surveys is that there are chances that the expected respondents of this survey do not fill these questionnaires, while respondents who are not fit to form the sample population of the survey might go on to fill in these form leading to corrupt data being collected and presented during the research findings. The research findings based on this malign data will not be authentic and if published will lead to a spread of knowledge that is wrong. And if by chance this finding gets implemented that it may result in heavy losses for the party implementing it (Nancarrow, Pallister and Brace, 2001). Other issues of conducting research over the internet are that sometimes customers might feel agitated by a questionnaire in their inbox, they might think of it as an invasion to their privacy or as something having a malign content in it that might threaten the integrity of their personal computer. Also there are strict guidelines set by major research agencies and associations as to what questions can be asked from a particular