This paper assesses the market research process used by a private airline company exploring whether to reconfigure its jet interiors — reducing passenger seats and installing tables — to better serve business leaders who charter flights for meetings and productivity. The assessment critiques the research design's failure to properly define the sampling frame, target audience, and hypothesis, and highlights the absence of behavioral segmentation. It further examines shortcomings in attitudinal and psychographic research, questionnaire design issues such as respondent fatigue and social desirability bias, and the sampling bias introduced by incentivizing flight attendants to collect responses.
The paper demonstrates applied critique of a research design by systematically working through the stages of the research process — objective-setting, sampling, instrumentation, and data collection — and identifying a specific methodological failure at each stage. This stepwise evaluation is a hallmark of research methods coursework at the undergraduate level.
The paper opens with a brief contextual overview of the business scenario, then moves into a sustained assessment section that addresses sampling frame problems, the absence of behavioral segmentation, the need for attitudinal and psychographic research, questionnaire length and fatigue, and finally, interviewer-induced sampling bias. The argument builds logically from design flaws to data collection flaws.
A private airline company initiated a market research project to assess the preferences of business leaders who frequently charter business jets to hold meetings and get work done while traveling. The research sought to determine whether reconfiguring the interior of their jets — reducing the number of seats and installing tables instead — would be commercially viable. Although this cabin reconfiguration would significantly reduce the number of passengers each flight could hold, it could potentially lead to greater profitability by appealing more directly to business leaders who charter planes on a regular basis. The intent of this paper is to assess the research process used to gain insights into whether the cabin reconfiguration should be completed.
What is immediately apparent is that the research design was not carefully constructed to capture input from the most critical members of the company's customer base: the business leaders themselves. The research design needs to be redone to concentrate on redefining the sampling frame, including the target audience and the required sample size, in order to ensure the results deliver a high level of statistical validity and reliability. Only after defining the sampling frame, sample size, and hypothesis should the data collection method be determined (Hague, 2002).
Most troubling is the absence of segmentation based on previous respondent behavior, which is critical for any services-based business to understand and plan for in the context of market research projects (Harris & Uncles, 2007). Focusing specifically on the most loyal business leaders who fly with the airline could lead to an entirely different research design — one that tests an even more fundamental hypothesis: why business leaders are choosing this private airline in the first place. The two major determinants of why business travelers choose one airline over another are cost versus service (Huse & Evangelho, 2007). What is needed is greater concentration, first, on the objectives of the study in light of the proposed reconfiguration's shift toward full service relative to low cost. Once that hypothesis is established in conjunction with a pricing analysis of how much loyal business leader travelers are currently willing to pay, a more accurate research design can be developed.
Following a clarification of the research design and hypothesis, the research team also needs to consider attitudinal and psychographic research in addition to purely examining pricing economics as they relate to providing greater services on their jets in the form of meeting areas. Specifically, understanding what business leaders consider to be exceptional service offerings — relative to their baseline levels of expectation — is critical to determining whether the inclusion of tables is even within their set of preferences or minimum expectations (Enquist, Edvardsson, & Sebhatu, 2007).
Only by setting hypotheses and research objectives that seek to ascertain the minimum expectations of business leaders who choose to charter jets, in addition to their preferences, can accurate data be captured. In the context of the questionnaire, the research team then needs to pay attention to attitudinal variables and, using Likert scales, capture minimum expectations relative to preferences (Ping, 2004).
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