The scenario in this case study illustrates Pennon Media, a publisher of business magazines such as Industry Week, Machine Design, and Restaurant Hospitality, as having a decline in their use of publication reader service cards. While there was exponential progress of reader card responses within a period of five years from 1992 to 1997, the numbers began to drop in later years. Because of the decline, Pennon Media began to carry out research through surveys to better gain an understanding of their evaluation with the reader card responses.
Within these surveys, 676 of the respondents were purchase decision makers and most of them had mentioned that they had contacted at lease one of the advertisers throughout the past year. Other important information that has been gathered from this scenario is the method of the preferred method of communication when it comes to requesting inquiries related to the advertisement within the service reader cards. Build the management-research question hierarchy After looking into this scenario, it is important to build upon the management- research question hierarchy.
This hierarchy specifically answers the questions to discover the management dilemma, define the management question, and to define the research questions. Starting with the first hierarchy of discovering the management dilemma, there are multiple questions that are to be asked. To better clarify this dilemma, it is usually the symptom of the problem (Cooper & Schneider, 2014). When discovering what the symptom of the problem in this case, the reader would see that the decline in the use of the reader cards would ultimately affect the advertisement sales.
This affects Pennon Media indirectly, as if the advertising companies were to experience a decline in their own sales, they would ultimately pull from advertising in their publication. This could lead to Pennon Media losing revenue, unless they were to make the decision to raise the costs of their publication. Raising the cost of publication could potentially have a long-term effect, as the number of their consumers would decline because of it. The second question of defining the management question simply consists of what should be done in order to increase the responses from the publication reader service cards.
This question specifically should be broken down to the kind of research that should be conducted to making sure that the right questions are being asked when doing this research. It is important for a company to understand within their research the importance of asking the right questions. If the wrong question is asked, a stumbling block is created from assisting in the improvement of the interactions from the reader service cards. Another question within this category that could be asked would relate to whether the advertisements are bringing in the same amount of responses as they were before.
If these advertisements were not bringing in the same number of responses, then it would now be time to look and see what can be done to see where the decline had appeared. The third and final hierarchy question is to define the research question. As stated before, it is important for the questions to be broken down to make sure that the right ones are being asked. To further create depth, the questions that should be asked would include if the reader Irvine cards are worth using or should an alternate method of response be utilized in order for consumers to engage?
The investigative question, stated as the questions that the researcher must answer to satisfactorily answer the research question, would also be answered in this hierarchy (Cooper & Schneider, 2014). This question would be if there are additional advertising methods that would better bring in consumers to make inquires about each individual product or service. In this case, these questions would consist of the percentages of the mind of responses that were given for each answer.
The measurement questions should also be answered as the discovering what the participants are specifically being asked and what was specifically being observed. These would go along with possibly asking about geographical locations and seeing if they particularly play a factor in the participation of the usage of the reader service cards. Answering these questions would further assist in making sure that resources are properly being used to not only reach the maximum amount of people, but to create an increase in the interaction numbers as well.
What ethical issues are relevant to this study? The ethical issues that are relevant to this story are simply the importance of making sure that the research response numbers are accurate. Giving inaccurate information can not only affect the amount of money that another company spends, but also the amount of effort that is needed to be put forth in the project. This could be a result of requesting more money than needed for the sake of personal gain. Or not requesting enough money and requiring people to ark harder than what is necessary when it comes to executing the research needed.
Another ethical issue that is relevant is making sure that the information received is kept confidentially. It is unethical to share personal information given from consumers with other companies for the sake of money and connections. Pennon Media holds the most responsibility for making sure that the confidentiality of their research participants is held closely and is not being shared.
