MARKETING RESEARCH IN THE DIGITAL ERA

To adapt to consumers’ evolving needs and shopping styles, organizations are becoming more and more attentive to consumers' digital experience with their brand(s). Many companies are investing heavily in their websites and in social media platforms, which are used as additional arms to inform/educate customers, to sell products/services, to provide customer services, and/or to offer convenient media for customers to conduct commercial or social transactions.
In order for companies to do it right and to achieve the desired ROI, they need to listen to the voice of customers and to precisely understand how customers behave in these new media.
Market research has a big role to play in this equation, as it measures the downstream results of all the upstream investments companies have made to engage their customers and develop their digital presence. This is a hands on course where students will carry out a full-fledged simulation of a market research project to measure consumers digital experience. We will focus on the importance of capturing the customers’ voice and on all the critical metrics that should be measured in order to understand the underlying causes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction among customers. Throughout the course we will be referring to real-life examples and articles from the industry to keep students current with all the recent developments in this critical business domain. Some topics that will be covered: building an effective online survey with high completion rate; how to elicit/use different types of feedback (random vs. self initiated); how research helps e-commerce websites increase conversion rate and reduce chart abandonment; how segmenting customers by intent is sometimes more effective than demographic profiling in helping companies create a more personalized online experiences; new opportunities and challenges produced by social media.