Assignment – Comparing Research Tools

Assignment – Comparing Research Tools

You have just been hired as the promotion manager for a tobacco company. You are concerned that recent labeling and advertising legislation as well as all the publicity about the harmful effects of tobacco products your company, after years of success, may begin to falter. Your problem is how to identify the users’ motives that has made cigarette smoking popular in the past.

Your assignment consists in selecting the most adequate research method (focus groups or Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) to conduct your research.

1. First, you must conduct research and describe the basic features of each method.

2. Next, indicate pros and cons of the two methods.

3. Lastly, you will provide the rationale for your choice, considering the scope of the research problem described above.

· Focus groups are one of the advertising researcher’s most versatile tools. It is a discussion session with typically 6-12 participants who have been brought together to provide new insights about a product, service or idea. It involves narratives.

· Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is a projective technique used to draw out consumer’s thoughts and feelings about products and/or brands in terms of metaphors. (A metaphor defines one thing in terms of another). It involves both imagery and narratives.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.