Курсовая работа: Marketing in tourism
To maximize the proportion of subjects answering our questionnaire - that is, the response rate.
To obtain accurate relevant information for our survey.
To maximize our response rate, we have to consider carefully how we administer the questionnaire, establish rapport, explain the purpose of the survey, and remind those who have not responded. The length of the questionnaire should be appropriate. In order to obtain accurate relevant information, we have to give some thought to what questions we ask, how we ask them, the order we ask them in, and the general layout of the questionnaire.
As discussed in last month's issue, there are three potential types of information:
Information we are primarily interested in-that is, dependent variables.
Information which might explain the dependent variables-that is, independent variables.
Other factors related to both dependent and independent factors which may distort the results and have to be adjusted for - that is, confounding variables.
Let us take as an example a national survey to find out students' factors predicting the level of certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes at the end of their undergraduate medical course. The dependent factors include the students' level of relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The independent factors might include students' learning styles, GCSE and A level grades, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, etc. Confounding variables might include the types and quality of teaching in each medical school.
Sometimes, additional questions are used to detect the consistency of the subject's responses. For example, there may be a tendency for some to tick either "agree" or "disagree" to all the questions. Additional contradictory statements may be used to detect such tendencies.
There are several ways of administering questionnaires. They may be self administered or read out by interviewers. Self administered questionnaires may be sent by post, email, or electronically online. Interview administered questionnaires may be by telephone or face to face.
Advantages of self administered questionnaires include:
- Cheap and easy to administer.
- Preserve confidentiality.
- Can be completed at respondent's convenience.
- Can be administered in a standard manner.
Advantages of interview administered questionnaires include:
- Allow participation by illiterate people.
- Allow clarification of ambiguity.
The exact method of administration also depends on who the respondents are. For example, university lecturers may be more appropriately surveyed by email; older people by telephone interviews; train passengers by face to face interviews.
Piloting and evaluation of questionnaires. Given the complexity of designing a questionnaire, it is impossible even for the experts to get it right the first time round. Questionnaires must be pretested - that is, piloted - on a small sample of people characteristic of those in the survey. In a small survey, there might be only pretesting of the drafted questionnaire. In a large survey, there may be three phases of piloting. In the first phase we might ask each respondent in great detail about a limited number of questions: effects of different wordings, what they have in mind when they give a particular answer, how they understand a particular word, etc. In the second phase the whole questionnaire is administered by interviewers. Analysis of the responses and the interviewers' comments are used to improve the questionnaire. Ideally, there should be sufficient variations in responses among respondents; each question should measure different qualities - that is, the responses between any two items should not be very strongly correlated - and the non-response rate should be low. In the third phase the pilot test is polished to improve the question order, filter questions, and layout.
Usually respondents spent an average of 33 minutes answering a variety of questions about their «backgrounds, tastes, and their shopping and media consumption habits».
The Grande Bretagne Hotel most (8,852) came from Britain, followed by the U.S. (3,747), and Norway (3,244). The fewest responses were from Venezuela (197), Portugal (175), and Austria (90). And responses was split pretty equally between genders: 51 % of survey takers were female, 49 % male. Most respondents were in the 13- to 15-year-old age group (60 %), followed by 16- to 18-year-olds (19 %). Only 12 % were 12 and under (which is odd since players are supposed to be at least 13 to play), and 10 % were 19 and older.
Task 3 - Information for Marketing Decisions
Market research consists of two primary categories: primary data and secondary data.
Primary data is made of information obtained through focus groups, surveys, and observation.
Secondary data is provided by another group, such as the Census Bureau, a professional association, or think tank. A problem with using secondary data sources is their information may not relate to your target market or geographic area.
Obtaining primary data yourself is time consuming and can be expensive; but how much money have you or your company wasted on advertising or activities that ended up not generating the business you thought they would?
There is need to have some primary data in customers’ buying patterns. If there is no a system that provides you with mechanisms to breakdown data into various groups, then there is need to begin investigating how to acquire one.
As the hotel began to study expenses, it discovered that managers were over-scheduling employees on the weekends and even paying overtime to deal with the expected increase in customers that marketing was driving in. Naturally most business would come in on the weekend and the facility would staff up on Friday afternoons and evenings. When check-in data was examined, management discovered that most visitors were checking in on Saturday morning. By making scheduling adjustments and cross-training employees, the hotel was able to use fewer employees to handle the influx of customers. More employees were given time off on Friday nights, raising employee morale which resulted in improved customer service. Soon, expenses were down, revenue was up, and most importantly, profits were up.
None of that would have happened if management didn’t take the time to look at the statistics, analyze the data, and make adjustments.