Office Hours

Mondays 11:00 – 1:00 and Thursdays 1:00 – 3:00, or by appointment. I am around quite a bit, so please feel free to drop-in anytime.

Textbook

McDaniel and Gates, Marketing Research Essentials, 4^th ed., (2004), John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Enrollment Management Procedures

Students that do not show to the first two classes will be disenrolled from the class. I will take a waiting list of students that want to get into the class. During the first two weeks of the course, should any spots in the class become open I will prioritize admittance based on class standing and whether or not the student is a business major.

Prerequisites

Completion of MKTG 170.

Course Material on the Web

Materials (e.g., class notes, study guides, assignments) will be made available on my Web CT site. If you need help with anything related to WebCT, you can stop by the help desk in the first floor computer lab in Meriam Library or call the Student Computing Help Line at 530-898-HELP (4357).

Course Description

This class is meant to provide an overview of the marketing research process. The course introduces the tools and techniques of marketing research as an aid to marketing decision-making. It covers the definitions of research problems, research methodologies, design of research projects, analysis and interpretation of research results. Emphasizes the practical aspects of conducting and evaluating marketing research studies. Overall, the class explores the marketing research fundamentals of problem formulation, data collection, research design, questionnaire design, sampling, managing and implementing data collection, analyzing and interpreting results, and communicating the findings and implications of the research.

Course Objectives

By the end of this class, a “successful” student should:

1) Be an intelligent consumer and producer of marketing research information.

2) Be able to provide an overview of the marketing research process.

3) Be able to enumerate the uses and limitations of marketing research. In particular, I hope you will leave this class

knowing how to identify and avoid bad research.

4) Be able to critique, use, and interpret commonly used analytical/statistical techniques.

5) Be able to create, write-up, and present a marketing research project.

Exams

There are three exams in this course. All exams will cover the material from the book, other assigned readings, as well as material presented during class. The exams will include an essay and multiple-choice questions.

The final exam is cumulative. The final will cover the whole semester. Marketing research is a process and you must understand the whole process in order to be a successful user or producer.

Missed Exams: No make-up exams will be given unless the student can meet the instructor’s definition of what constitutes a good excuse (e.g. student is hospitalized). Notes verifying the reason for missing an exam will be required.

Homework Assignments

Assignments will be made on a periodic basis. These will be announced in class. If you miss a class, it is your responsibility to find out if any assignments were made. We will likely have a handful of assignments that I will ask you to type up and hand into me. The average grade you get on these will be used to calculate your overall grade for this part of the course. For example, if your grades on five assignments were .75, .95, .90, .85, and .88, at the end of the semester, I will take the average of these, .866, and multiply it by the total points available (100). In this example, the student would earn 86.6 points out of the possible 100 at the end of the semester.

All these assignments are to be typed and done on your own (These are not group projects.). I will not accept papers that are not typed.

Class Participation and Attendance

Your participation and attendance in class is a part of your grade and the learning that can take place in this course. A critical component of your participation grade will be based on how prepared you are to discuss each chapter, assignments that have been given (e.g., exercises or articles distributed in class), and how engaged you appear to be in the class dialog. Student participation can make the class much more enjoyable for everyone. In addition, I believe that a lot of learning can occur during office hours, and will give students class participation credit for coming into my office with relevant questions or comments.

Overall, your class participation grade will be based on your comments and questions during class, discussion of assignments, class attendance, and patronage during office hours. I will reduce your participation grade (sometimes significantly) should you be a class disturbance (e.g., reading the newspaper in class, idle chatting and joking during class, working on other things during class).

Although class attendance is only one part of your participation grade, numerous absences will significantly reduce your participation points:

*1-3 absences: No penalty

*4-5 absences: Slight grade penalty (-25 points)

*More than 5 absences: Say “bye-bye” to participation and attendance points (-50 points)

Be prepared! Be engaged! You certainly don't want to hear only my voice nonstop every day for the next fifteen weeks!

Education and learning are not achieved through one-way communication; the process must be dyadic, so please, be an active participant.

The Project

This course has a significant marketing research project. These projects are time-consuming. Please be prepared to put in substantial effort to make this project worthwhile. Each project will involve the following: 1) Development of a research proposal and timeline. 2) Development of a questionnaire. 3) Collection of data. 4) Input, tabulate, analyze, and interpret the data. 5) Presentation of findings (written and oral). I will provide a lot more detail on the project as the semester progresses.

Project Peer Evaluations: You will have the opportunity to evaluate your fellow group members. I will use the peer evaluation in calculating an overall final project grade for each student. Being an irresponsible group member (e.g., not returning calls in a timely fashion, not attending meetings, not contributing, not adhering to timelines, poor work or a poor work ethic) will hurt your grade.

Overall Performance Evaluation Points Percentage

Exam 1 100 pts. 10%

Exam 2 150 pts. 15%

Final Exam 200 pts. 20%

Assignments 100 pts. 10%

Project: (total of 40 pts., 40% of your grade)

Proposal and Timeline 50 pts. 5%

Questionnaire 50 pts. 5%

Oral Report 100 pts. 10%

Written Report 200 pts. 20%

Participation 50 pts. 5%

Total 1000 pts. 100%

Late assignments will be penalized 10% and I will not accept assignments any later than two days after the due date. Late is defined as turning something in after the class period during which the assignment is due. The small miscellaneous homework assignments will not be accepted late (NIAOBs).

Grades will be based as follows:

Grade		Points	Grade		Points
A	4.0	925-1000	C	2.0	725-764
A-	3.7	895-925	C-	1.7	695-724
B+	3.3	865-894	D+	1.3	665-694
B	3.0	825-864	D	1.0	625-664
B-	2.7	795-824	F	0.0	<625
C+	2.3	765-794

I will not curve unless I feel it is necessary at the end of the semester.

Course Material Competency Threshold

I have become concerned that a student may have minimal to no knowledge about course material but “gets by” in the course due to help from friends on homework or free-riding on the performance of others during a group project. Therefore, I have implemented a course content competency threshold grade based purely on your average exam grades.

Your grade in a class reflects a number of factors, but exam grades alone are the only pure indicator of your individual degree of course material competency. If a student’s average exam grade at the end of the semester is less than a 62.5%, the student will receive a failing grade (F) in the class. My objective with this policy is an attempt to have grades that accurately reflect a student’s knowledge of the course material. This policy will only affect students that are consistently failing the exams. Students that can’t, on average, get higher than a 62.5% on the exams have clearly demonstrated a lack of being competent in the course material, have failed to meet the minimum requirements of the course, and will therefore receive an F in the class (see University Catalog 2003-2005, Definition of Letter Grading Symbols, p. 154).

Student Responsibilities

v Prior to class, please make sure you have read the material from each assigned chapter - Be Prepared!

v Read and understand course syllabus.

v You must have a Chico State Wildcat email account. To create an account go to: www.csuchico.edu/stcp/email/create.shtml.

If you regularly use some other email account (e.g., hotmail, yahoo!, aol), please still create your Wildcat account, then just use the forward option (www.csuchico.edu/stcp/email/forward.shtml) to have all your mail forwarded to the account you

normally use.

v Read email on a regular basis.

v Occasionally we will have assignments (questions from the end of a chapter, thoughts about an article, hand

outs) that we will discuss in class. Please be prepared to discuss these assignments. Participation in these

discussions will be a critical part of your participation grade.

v Attendance is encouraged and will play a role in your participation grade. If you miss class, please do not ask

me to give you notes or review the session. It is your responsibility to get the information from a classmate.

v Academic Honesty: Cheating of any kind is an unacceptable behavior and will not be tolerated. Do your own

work! Do not collaborate with others on assignments. Don’t cross the line from merely helping someone

understand an assignment or concept to just giving them the work. Violators of the University's Codes on

Academic Honesty will be referred to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs for hearings, and will

automatically receive an "F" for the course if found guilty. See www.csuchico.edu/sjd/discipline/honesty.html for

examples of what behaviors are considered academic dishonesty.

v Professionalism:

· I expect all work turned into me to follow basic rules of professionalism. All work submitted to me needs to be typed (double-spaced) and stapled. Make sure you follow instructions and proofread assignments. You should treat work in this class as you would work for an employer. If your work is sloppy and reflects a poor work ethic you will not get that nice big end-of-the year bonus.

· Arrive to class in a timely fashion and do not be disruptive during class (e.g., no reading the newspaper during class, no chit-chat about plans for the evening, etc.).

· Do not “prepare” to leave class prior to the actual end of class.

· No NEDs (noise emitting devices, e.g., cell phones, pagers). Please place your NEDs either on vibrate or turn them off during class time.

Marketing Research - Tentative Course Schedule

The key word above is “tentative.” I will make every attempt to keep to the schedule, but it is likely that it may change a bit. The one thing I will guarantee is that the exam dates will not change. This way you can plan accordingly to make sure you don’t miss the exams.

Week	Date	Topic/Issues	Text Chapter(s)
1	TU 8/24	Introduction
	TH 8/26	Role of Marketing Research The Research Industry & Ethics	Chp. 1 Chp. 15
2	TU 8/31	The Marketing Research Process	Chp. 2
	TH 9/2	The Marketing Research Process
3	TU 9/7	Acquiring Data: Secondary Research	Chp. 3
	TH 9/9	Acquiring Data: Qualitative Research Side Issue: Working in a Group	Chp. 4
4	TU 9/14	Acquiring Data: Qualitative Research
	TH 9/16	Acquiring Data: Observation and Survey Research	Chp. 5, 6
5	TU 9/21	9/21: Exam 1: Most likely chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 15 and any other material covered in class.
	TH 9/23	Acquiring Data: Observation and Survey Research	Chp. 5, 6
6	TU 9/28	Acquiring Data: Survey Research
	TH 9/30	Concepts of Measurement and Measurement Scales 9/30: Proposals Due	Chp. 8
7	TU 10/5	Concepts of Measurement and Measurement Scales
	TH 10/7	Questionnaire Design	Chp. 9
8	TU 10/12 TH 10/14	Questionnaire Design Introduction to SPSS and Cleaning Data	Chp. 12
9	TU 10/19 TH 10/21	10/19: Questionnaires Due – Bring in 2 copies 10/21: Exam 2: Most likely chapters 5, 6, 8, 9, and any other material covered in class.
10	TU 10/26 TH 10/28	Introduction to SPSS and Data Analysis Data Analysis: The Basics and Crosstabulations	Chp. 13
11	TU 11/2 TH 11/4	Data Analysis: Correlation and Regression Data Analysis: Correlation and Regression	Chp. 14
	TU 11/9	Side Issue: Writing a Quality Research Report
12	TH 11/11	The Sampling Process (Check out: www.surveysampling.com or www.dunhills.com)	Chp. 10, 11
13	TU 11/16 TH 11/18	The Sampling Process Side Issue: Giving a Quality Presentation
	TU 11/23 TH 11/25	Gobble - Gobble – Time for a break and feast. Happy Thanksgiving. No classes.
14	TU 11/30	Experimental Research Designs	Chp. 7
	TH 12/2	Class conclusion.
15	TU 12/7 TH 12/9	12/7: All Written Reports Are Due. First set of presentations. Second set of presentations.
	Final Exam	Final will be on Tuesday, 12/14, 6:00-7:50, this room.

The Writing Center

To ensure your writing is of the highest quality (great for students whose first language is not English), I suggest you check out the Writing Center. It is free of charge and good to use no matter how well you are doing in a course. Information about the center can be found at, http://online.csuchico.edu/public/Writing_Center/index.html, Taylor Hall, Room 203, or by calling 898-5042.

Written Report 200 pts. 20%

Text Chapter(s)

TH 10/14

Final Exam