Researching Target Markets

International Market Research

Week 4 - Introduction

Market research is any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy. The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets. ( Wikipedia )

Marketing research [...] is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. ( Wikipedia )

Statistical Methods

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. It deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments ( Wikipedia )

• Population
• Census
• Unit (sampling unit)
• Sample and Sampling
• Variable
• Data matrix

One row for one unit

One column for each variable

There are different levels of measurement

• Nominal scale
• Ordinal scale
• Interval scale
• Ratio scale

Calculus is the mathematical study of change in the same way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of operations and their application to solving equations.

It has two major branches, differential calculus (concerning rates of change and slopes of curves), and integral calculus (concerning accumulation of quantities and the areas under curves); these two branches are related to each other by the fundamental theorem of calculus. ( Wikipedia )

A time series is a sequence of data points, measured typically at successive points in time spaced at uniform time intervals. ( Wikipedia ) An example are the closing values over time of stock market index ( jubo-jubo )