1. Is it possible to make sound managerial decisions without business research? What advantages does research offer to the decision maker over seat-of-the-pants decision making? 2. Define a marketing orientation and a product orientation. Under which strategic orientation is there a greater need for business research?
1. Is it possible to make sound managerial decisions without business research? What advantages does research offer to the decision maker over seat-of-the-pants decision making?
2. Define a marketing orientation and a product orientation. Under which strategic orientation is there a greater need for business research?
Seat of the pants decision making refers to the decision making without any defined course of action/roadmap to attain the results. Sometimes higher authorities have enough experience that they can make decisions without any data to support the decisions. This happens in market in most of the time when any new product/service is launched and for which data is not readily available.
In such a case the reliability of decision is not very high and hence, the scale of offering is usually kept low in order to avoid any unfavorable events.
For example, if a company is thinking to launch a new mobile with extreme features but without a camera, then it cannot take a risk of manufacturing them on a very huge scale. They must first deliver in small batches to know the market response. In such a case, if the response is not favorable then the monetary losses incurred will be high.
It is possible in some cases to make decisions without market research. However, in majority of the cases the decision based on the market research are more successful. Making a decision without any formal planning/theory/road-map is same as offering someone a non-veg burger without knowing whether he/she is a non-vegetarian or not.
The probability of failure of decisions made without research is high. A very common example of this is, the launch of non-veg burgers (beef burgers) by MC Donald’s in India.
This decision of the company lacked market research. The company thought of being successful by selling beef burgers in India based on their experience in US of America but failed drastically.
After getting a setback only the company realized their mistake of lack of market research.
One can therefore say that the success of seat-of-the-pants is purely luck but success of research-based strategy is purely the effective strategies of the company.
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