Integrated Marketing Communications
Essays

Today, FedEx Corp. (hereinafter alternatively "FedEx" or "the company") it the world's largest express transportation company and offers its customers and businesses a wide range of transportation, e-commerce and…

Vinny's Prima Prego! Is a blossoming gourmet pasta restaurant in Kansas City with a rapidly developing consumer brand and growing customer base. The restaurant is to serve the younger generation of working professionals…

¶ … Highest Performing Promotional Tools and Strategies in the Marketing Communications Mix for Attracting Volunteers for the 2012 Olympic Games

TruFocals are a new set of glasses which strive to maximize the advantages of traditional glasses, while limiting their disadvantages. The scope of this endeavor is that of constructing an advertising plan for the…

Advisory for Fast Food Business and Takeaway

Organizations are formed to increase the residual claim and mitigate the expenses. Inevitably, organizations have to take numerous actions to direct their performance. Actually, organization is a place in which people…

The growth of mass customization as a strategy for more closely aligning product strategies with the specific needs of consumers has been shown to increase the potential for greater profits and the ability to create…

This paper is a review of the article entitled, IBM's strategy keeps it in and on demand. It discusses how IBM has utilized a IMC campaign successfully to rebuild its failing brand image, raising it to one of the top…

There are several significant advantages of using qualitative measurements in marketing research. The most significant is the ability to capture the voice of customers that may have evaded the more structured, numerically-based approaches that force respondents to provide a specific set of answers. Qualitative research can also lead to entirely new insights into a new market or service that has not been seen in the past, given the open-ended questions inherent in this approach to research. Qualitative research techniques also can be used to capture the shared knowledge of experts as well, as the Delphi Technique is so well-known and used for. Capturing the tacit expertise and knowledge of a specific group of thought leaders can also be accomplished using qualitative techniques as well. Additional advantages of qualitative measurements include the ability to complete greater exploratory or primary research into a specific subject, often following a specific line of questions as they develop within an interview. An additional advantage of qualitative research techniques are the ability to understand how prospects and customers make trade-offs on substitute products and services. While price elasticity studies are often highly quantitative in scope, the use of interactive discussions of pricing trade-offs can be highly effective in determining just how much a prospect is willing to sacrifice price for a given feature or benefit. The total value of a brand can also be ascertained through the use of these types of qualitative techniques, providing respondents with the ability to define in their own terms the value of the experience a brand delivers. The many advantages of qualitative research are predicated on having more interactive sessions with respondents, including the ability to ascertain how they make trade-offs over time on value versus price. For the many advantages of qualitative measurements, there are several disadvantages as well. First, the results of any study predicated on this approach cannot be analyzed at the higher levels of statistical analysis. As the results of studies and research completed with qualitative measurements are by nature not nominal, ordinal or interval in terms of data orthogonality, they cannot be used to represent an entire customer or segment population. At best they can be used as a means to capture nominally-based data that can lead to only a rough approximation of an overall market size or series of market dynamics. Qualitative data can only be as useful as the means used to capture it as well; if a methodology is very informal and focused on a series of loosely-guided objectives, the overall data will of mediocre quality at best. When the goals and objectives of a research study, in addition to the sampling frame and methodology lack rigor or precise focus, the resulting research can also lack precision and meaning. It is more difficult to create greater levels of meaning and transferability of data when the methodologies are highly qualitative in scope; the data is only relevant for a specific series of objectives and often is defined by applicability to a given point in time as well. Qualitative data is often also open to interpretation, as the methodology can be debated in terms of its relative appropriateness, robustness and value over the long-term. Finally, qualitative data cannot be taken entirely on its own; it must be combined with a series of other research sources to ensure relevancy and accuracy of interpretation, especially over time. In conclusion, qualitative data needs to be taken in context and often balanced with quantitative data to ensure a 360-degree view of a given situation or strategy of interest has the greater level of insights gained from research efforts.

Strategic Action Plan Nosh Communications