CS Market Research & Analysis 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A strategist wants to understand emotional drivers behind purchasing decisions. Which research method is MOST appropriate?
- Online survey with Likert scales
- Ethnographic observation in natural settings (Correct answer)
- Secondary data analysis from industry reports
- Conjoint analysis of product features
Correct answer: Ethnographic observation in natural settings
Ethnographic observation captures authentic behavior and emotional context that self-reported surveys cannot fully reveal.
Question 2: Which statistical measure best indicates the central tendency of household income data that contains extreme outliers?
- Mean
- Mode
- Median (Correct answer)
- Standard deviation
Correct answer: Median
The median is resistant to extreme values (outliers), making it the most representative measure of central tendency for skewed income data.
Question 3: A company's TAM is $10B, its SAM is $3B, and its SOM is $500M. What does the SOM represent?
- The total global demand for the product category
- The segment the company can realistically serve given constraints
- The revenue the company can realistically capture given competition (Correct answer)
- The maximum revenue if all SAM customers were acquired
Correct answer: The revenue the company can realistically capture given competition
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the realistic share of the SAM a company can capture, accounting for competition, sales capacity, and go-to-market limitations.
Question 4: What is the primary purpose of a perceptual map in market analysis?
- To forecast future market share using regression models
- To visualize how consumers position competing brands on key attributes (Correct answer)
- To segment customers based on demographic variables
- To identify distribution channel gaps in a target market
Correct answer: To visualize how consumers position competing brands on key attributes
Perceptual maps plot competing brands on two-dimensional axes based on consumer perceptions, revealing competitive positioning and white-space opportunities.
Question 5: Which sampling method would a strategist use when the population has distinct subgroups and proportional representation of each is critical?
- Convenience sampling
- Snowball sampling
- Stratified random sampling (Correct answer)
- Cluster sampling
Correct answer: Stratified random sampling
Stratified random sampling divides the population into subgroups (strata) and samples proportionally from each, ensuring representation across key segments.
Question 6: A brand's Net Promoter Score (NPS) drops from +42 to +18 quarter over quarter. What is the FIRST analytical step a strategist should take?
- Launch a competitor benchmarking study
- Segment NPS data by customer cohort, tenure, and product line (Correct answer)
- Immediately redesign the customer experience
- Commission a new brand awareness survey
Correct answer: Segment NPS data by customer cohort, tenure, and product line
Segmenting NPS data by cohort and product line helps isolate where the decline originated before prescribing remedies or launching broader research.
Question 7: In the context of market research, what is 'respondent fatigue' and why does it matter?
- Researchers becoming bored with repetitive data, reducing analytical rigor
- Survey respondents providing careless or random answers due to survey length, reducing data quality (Correct answer)
- Panel members dropping out of longitudinal studies, creating survivorship bias
- Focus group moderators losing objectivity after multiple sessions
Correct answer: Survey respondents providing careless or random answers due to survey length, reducing data quality
Respondent fatigue occurs when surveys are too long, causing participants to rush or answer randomly, which introduces noise and reduces the validity of findings.
CS Market Research & Analysis 2
A strategist wants to understand emotional drivers behind purchasing decisions.
Which research method is MOST appropriate?