Hi there,
I'm in college, and I've been assigned to take a seminar on the topic 'Market Survey techniques'. I have zero financial background(being a history student), so I'm finding it hard to get materials to sort out a small 15 page report and develop a seminar talk out of it. Any quick help on reading material would be highly appreciated! And of course I plan to give a small intro. on the Austrian view of entrepreneurship during the seminar. Any quick read on the same too would be welcome.
Thanks!
What do you mean by "Market Survey Techniques"?
If you mean surveying techniques used in marketing, then I think conjoint analysis would be an interesting discussion topic.
Basically, conjoint analysis is a survey technique that enables market researchers to figure out how much different features of a product or service influence your willingness to pay for that product. For example, how much would people be willing to pay for 1 hour of extra battery life on their laptop?
Typically, most conjoint surveys done today are "discrete choice experiments" a.k.a "choice based conjoint analysis". Here, the survey respondent is shown two products that differ along a variety of features (for a laptop that might mean price, battery life, weight, color, etc) and asked which one they prefer. After they make a choice, they are shown a new set of hypothetical products that also differ along a variety of features and which on they prefer. The results of these choices can be combined with regression analysis to see how each feature influences the person's choice. This can be a very useful tool in helping companies to figure out how much they should charge for a new product . That's why its been increasinly adopted by businesses for the last 30 years.
A good, down-to-earth introduction can be found here (having a some small intro level understanding of statistics would be helpful in understand this, for example knowing what a regression is and how you interrupt the results would be good, but you could probably get by without it if your audience is low tech and you just want to give an over view):
http://www.mit.edu/~hauser/Papers/NoteonConjointAnalysis.pdf
Here is the wiki article (good for a *really* quick summary):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis_%28marketing%29
If you want to see cases where conjoint analysis has been used, there are some survey articles you can find in a couple of places like the Journal of Marketing. Here is one I found on a quick Google Scholar search, but it is way old (you could probably find more up-to-date survey articles by doing of Web of Science search for articles that cite this one).
"Commercial Use of Conjoint Analysis: An Update"
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1251345
Hope all this helps.
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