The Management of One of the Mobile Phone Vendors Strongly Believes: Research Proposal Coursework, NUS,, Singapore

Assignment Overview:

The management of one of the mobile phone vendors strongly believes that it is still possible to thrive in the Singapore market. It believes the key to its future success will depend on how well the company could build and sustain strong brand loyalty among its users.

In order to help it to develop relevant and effective marketing strategies to build strong loyalty, the management reckons it needs to understand the impact of factors such as brand image, brand personality, perception of corporate social responsibility, and product quality have on brand loyalty.

As a result, the management is interested to conduct a marketing research study among smartphone users in Singapore to find out the relationships between these factors and brand loyalty.

1) Assuming you are the marketing research consultant engaged by the company to design a marketing research study to meet the needs of the management. You are to provide justifications as to whether to conduct qualitative and/or quantitative research by comparing the applications and limitations of these two research approaches. You are expected to provide examples of business applications of both of these research approaches.

2) After studying your proposed research design, the management plans to go ahead with a two-stage research design by conducting focus groups followed by a quantitative study using online surveys.

3. a) Focus group discussions As the moderator of the focus groups, explain how you would go about planning and conducting the focus groups. The purpose of the focus groups is to identify the key factors that will drive brand loyalty and the findings will be used in the design of the questionnaire for the quantitative phase. You are expected to propose a maximum of 10 themes for the focus group discussions.

3. b) Online survey For the quantitative phase of the research, explain how you are going to select the respondents for the online survey. In your discussion, you are expected to examine the benefits of non-probability and probability sampling and justify the selection of the sampling method you have chosen.

4) Other than the proposed marketing research study, the management of the mobile phone vendor disclosed that it has a large database of customers’ contact details and basic demographic data which were collected in the warranty card filled in by the customers when they bought the smartphones. Provide suggestions on how the management could make use of these information. Your answers should also include the limitations for using such information.