The Market Research Toolbox: A Concise Guide for Beginners

If you want to conduct market research, but feel you have little experience in doing so, we have the ideal updated and revised resource for you! Written in an engaging and active style, the Second Edition of The Market Research Toolbox: A Concise Guide for Beginners describes how to think of market research in the context of making a business decision. The book begins by defining market research and discussing some of the various techniques. It then goes on to examine what objectives can be met by doing market research and the expected payoffs.  

The Market Research Toolbox examines six traditional market research techniques:
•  secondary research                                     • customer visits
• focus groups                                                 • surveys
• choice modeling                                           • experimentation  


Author Edward F. McQuarrie describes how each technique works, along with its costs, uses, tips for success, and when and how to use certain techniques, as well as precautions to take while using them.  

New to the Second Edition:

• Includes new chapters on questionnaire design, sampling procedures, and data analysis to ease students into developing their own market research 
• Expands the discussion of how to determine needed market research via analysis of the underlying decision problem
• Contains updated suggestions for additional reading to provide students with the most up-to-date resources on market research 
• Provides an Instructors Resource CD containing PowerPoint slides, case questions, teaching notes, and a sample syllabus

The Market Research Toolbox is a valuable textbook for a variety of advanced undergraduate and graduate business courses such as Marketing Research, Marketing Management, Customer Service, Industrial Marketing, Sales Management, Consumer Behavior, and Product Development. It will also be of particular interest to product managers, research & development managers, program managers, engineers, quality professionals, and executives responsible for developing business strategies.   

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.