Research on How to Market a New Product

Tolk (2012) added that the positivist approach is characterized by control, replication and hypothesis testing. These two methods were used to identify the opinions provided by interviewees.

Examine the advantages and disadvantages of using both positivist and interpretivist methods of research (20)

Please choose a business that you would like to use as your case study for the whole unit. Choose carefully and pick a business that you find interesting or already work/ed for. You will be required to research the business and its marketing strategies, so make sure your business has plenty of information available to you via various research methods, i.e. publications, internet, journals etc..

Research paradigms are ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community’ (Kuhn, 1970, p.175). The three most common paradigms are positivism, constructivism or interpretivism and pragmatism. Each of these can be categorised further by examining their: ontology, epistemology and methodology. Fundamentally, ontology is the nature of reality, epistemology describes the relationship the investigator has with their version of reality, and methodology is the various techniques and tools used to analysis their research.

I am going to look at how marketing techniques are used to market products in two different organisations, I am going to look at apple, a private sector business, and the Samsung is also a private sector business. Marketing is the management process that a business carries out, it is responsible for identifying anticipating and satisfying the customer’s requirements, and to help the business to make a profit.

Positivism is a "research philosophy that involves working with the observable social reality. The emphasis is on highly structured methodology to facilitate replication, and the end product can be law-like generalisations similar to those produced by the physical and natural scientists" (Saunders, 2003). The basic beliefs are that the world can be seen as an external and objective object where the observer remains independent. The action research literature has strongly challenged the character of ‘positivist' research (Waterman et al, 2001; Hart, 1996; Susman and Evered, 1978).

Market research is the study of markets (or groups of people) you would like to sell your product to. In other words, it is learning about your customers. Who are they? What do they want or need? What are their lifestyles?

11) ________ is the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.

The social science paradigm also known as Post positivism consists of testing hypothesis and research questions that are developed through reasoning. This is done through measurements and observation. Social scientists aspire to science and they seek to study human behaviour, interaction and thought in an organized way; which we can then measure, generalize and replicate. Like any research, post-positivism needs to be backed up by evidence. When a social science research sets out a research project, it is their goal to find evidence that can either agree or disagree with the hypothesis or theories. Post positivism, compared to positivism allows more interaction with the participants of the research project and seeks to highlight the relationship between universal properties between the variables. The best way to understand post positivism is by comparing it to positivism and the interpretive paradigm. Compared to positivism, post positivism is more tolerant for value-based information, however is not focused on qualitative information like the interpretive paradigm, instead the research is mainly focused on quantitative data.

Primarily, I’ll make use of the Positivist methodology of conducting out research which reinforces the objectivity of social reality (ontological) and methodological which simply means that the results sought after the research can easily be generalized to not only just the sample size but the entire

The beginning of knowledge comes from metaphysics, theological and positivism. And these put much on a critical stance in the discourse of method. Little (2011), explains that method is a prescriptive body of doctrines to guide inquiry. The ideal of understanding social world underlies in whether to embrace and use principles and guiding procedures of the natural world where positivism dominates in the epistemological consideration. This method has a considerable influence onto social scientist, in promoting the status of survey research and the quantitative analysis (Atkinson and Hammersley, 2007).

Research is important in our society since it contributes to the development of the world we live in. Research is completed to solve real-world problems related to why people think, feel and behave a certain way and to confirm and establish facts, reaffirm previous work, solve new or existing issues, and to support or develop new theories (Creswell, 2009). The research should be significant, relevant, and of interest to those working and studying in the field. A systematic approach using a research method that provides accurate, reliable, and selective critical use of data is necessary for conducting a good research. A good research supports or challenges existing theory.

Positivism offers a logical and efficient way of modelling reality, except the model created is a ‘restricted representation of a subset of existence.' The positivist assumption that science is the most appropriate theoretical perspective for social research will result in epistemologically under-justified use of quantitative methods for qualitative questions. The application of scientific methods can only be justified for use in the physical domain, not the

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Research is not neutral, but reflects a range of the researcher’s personal interests, values, abilities, assumptions aims and ambitions. “The research philosophy depends on the way you think about the development of knowledge” (Saunders et al. 2000, p.84)