Free Business Research Methods Essay Sample
Business research is an important exercise in solving business related problems. Business research is defined as the process of planning, acquiring, analyzing and then disseminating relevant data or information to decision makers who will in turn use the information to take appropriate actions that will maximize business performance.
Research proposal
Why are the sales of manufactured products of SalesPro declining in the south of our country while booming at the North?
Research question development
The management question will state the management dilemma in question form. Management questions are many but can be categorized into; objectives, generation and evaluation of solutions and troubleshooting. In doing any research, it is crucial to address the problems that may arise to ensure that the organization operates at the optimal level.
A large manufacturer of industrial goods, SalesPro, faces the dilemma of declining sales in south while booming in the North which is an unexplained continuing pattern. The management believes that it may be due to; salesperson compensation, product formulation or trade advertising. In formulating the research question we need to analyze the following; why are the sales declining in the south while booming in the North? How can the sales in the south be improved? Should the company introduce a certain percentage incentive for sales in the South, and what is the likelihood that the company will lose sales people if the quota is introduced? In the absence of such research questions, the company will be obviously at a loss as they will not make out how they are getting the losses (Lind D., Marchal W. and Wathen S. 2010).
Literature review
It appears that in the last one year alone, the SalesPro products have had mixed fortunes, in the south for example, sales have declined steadily by about 40% in our supermarket products. Average customer purchases have gone down. The case is different in the north where it seems that the average customer purchases has gone up pushing sales to about 20% more than they were in the previous year. Decline sales in the south can indicate to several reasons like a new competitor, reduced purchasing power of the southerners or simply unappealing goods from our company SalesPro. The purpose of this research is to unearth the reasons for south's decline despite an increase in sales at the north.
A research design is a blue print for collecting, measuring and analyzing data that aids a researcher in allocating the limited resources by posing crucial choices in methodology. Thus this is the plan of investigation conceived to obtain the research question answers.
This research paper will focus on the reasons and effects for Salespro's reduced sales in the south while sales are booming in the North. Regarding this research, we will primarily focus on the primary sources although we may refer to secondary sources and the internet for consultation. The method of data collection will include collecting information from dominant 20 various supermarkets which are geographically situated both in the south and the north. We will involve both qualitative and quantitative surveys and then be able to draw regression analysis. Data will be collected through interviews, self-reported instruments and the instruments presented after a stimulus condition. This is an unbiased sample which will ensure that all members of the population have a chance of taking part in the sample (Lind D., Marchal W. and Wathen S. 2010).
For the part of data analysis collected from the surveys, we will use SPSS software. We will focus on the reasons for the reasons for declining sales in the south. The second step will involve research on why sales in the north are booming. The last step will define the overall reasons for the two different behaviors. The assumption here is that most of the manufactured SalesPro goods are sold in the supermarkets and also that all the consumers in the North and the South use these products. But due to the fact that we selected 10 supermarkets each in the south and the north, we will ignore these limitations (McNamura. Basic business research Methods).
The results will be deduced using statistical applications and present them in tabular and graphical tools. Charts and tables will also be used. The research is expected to take about two months.
Control variables
A variable is defined as a characteristic that varies. Independent variables are those that the researcher has control over thus they can be manipulated over the existing variables or by introducing new variables. Dependent variables are those variables that show the effect of manipulating or introducing the independent variables. Several variables can relate to decline in sales at the south. The variables can be those that do not influence the reasons for decline. These are behavior, and personality variables. While the economic and demographic variables may affect the decline (McNamura. Basic business research Methods).
Sample design to collecting data
Sampling was chosen as the most appropriate method to collect our data. By selecting 10 supermarkets to do our sampling, we may be able to draw conclusions from the entire population. The elements of our sample will include the supermarket staff and shoppers in the supermarket. Reasons for using sampling were identified as; it is cheaper, has greater accuracy, availability of correspondents and reliable information. A big sample is needed and that is why we took to sample 20 supermarkets to have near accurate information (Lind D., Marchal W. and Wathen S. 2010).