Population
When considering any market sector we need to ask “Who is involved in this marketplace?” Who are the players? Who should be the centre of the investigation and where are those subjects? This area considers the target audience, customer or player; the users or non-users. Who will become the respondent or informant? Should we contact all players or just some of them? Should we carry out a census or a sample: should respondents be selected by probability or non-probability methods? An important concept for primary research is sampling. We choose to interview or observe people who we think will give us the information that will solve our problems. So in choosing our research method, we need to consider whom we select and how we select. This applies to qualitative research, with only a few people, and quantitative research with many people. Much emphasis in marketing research is on the end user, but “experts” can bridge the gap between primary and secondary data. An expert may be someone who has been in the business for many years. This part of the MR Mix involves identifying relevant sampling frames.
Read more about this topic: Marketing Research Mix
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)