The Market Research Toolbox: A Concise Guide for Beginners

Understanding marketing research to make better business decisions

An ideal resource for busy managers and professionals seeking to build and expand their marketing research skills, The Market Research Toolbox, Fourth Edition describes how to use market research to make strategic business decisions. This comprehensive collection of essential market research techniques, skills, and applications helps readers solve real-world business problems in a dynamic and rapidly changing business atmosphere. Based on real-world experiences, author Edward F. McQuarrie gives special attention to business-to-business markets, technology products, Big Data, and other web-enabled approaches. Readers with limited time or resources can easily translate the approaches from mass markets, simple products, and stable technologies to their own situations. Readers will master background context and the questions to ask before conducting research, as well as develop strategies for sorting through the extensive specialized material on market research.

Edward F. McQuarrie is a professor in the Department of Marketing, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, in California’s Silicon Valley. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1985 and a B.A. in Psychology and Literature from The Evergreen State College in 1976. His research interests include market research appropriate to technology products, on the one hand, and advertising strategies that call on rhetoric, narrative, and semiotic resources on the other. He has also written the book Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus, co-edited the volume Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric, and published articles in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Advertising, Marketing Theory, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Market Research Society, Journal of Advertising Research, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management, among others. For a current list of publications, you can access his profile on scholar.google.com or researchgate.net.

He was Associate Dean for Assessment at the Leavey School of Business, 2001-2010, responsible for the assessment of learning outcomes and the evaluation of teaching. He was Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, 1996–2000, responsible for the MBA and Executive MBA programs. Professor McQuarrie began moderating focus groups in 1980 for Burke Marketing Research. He has consulted for a variety of technology firms and has taught seminars on effective customer visits, managing focus group research, marketing research methods, and similar topics for the Management Roundtable, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple Computer, Tektronix, Varian Associates, Cadence Design, and other clients, in England, Germany, and New Zealand as well as the United States.