Experiments in Market Research

Abstract

The question of how a certain activity (e.g., the intensity of communicationactivities during the launch of a new product) influences important outcomes (e.g., sales, preferences) is one of the key questions in applied (as well as academic)research in marketing. While such questions may be answered based on observedvalues of activities and the respective outcomes using survey and/or archival data,it is often not possible to claim that the particular activity has actually caused theobserved changes in the outcomes. To demonstrate cause-effect relationships,experiments take a different route. Instead of observing activities, experimentationinvolves the systematic variation of an independent variable (factor) and theobservation of the outcome only. The goal of this chapter is to discuss th