Applied Marketing Research Challenges

Question: Discuss about the Applied Marketing Research Challenges. Answer: Introduction: The research that I had undertaken has taught me various aspects of research techniques and also about educational apps. Educational apps are gaining popularities among the students. It is a new and useful trend. While doing the research, I focused on this new trend. I faced some challenges and found the alternative solutions too. My teachers helped me and I took help of various literary resources. Here in this assignment, I will discuss the challenges that I faced and I tried to overcome the challenges by going for alternative options available to me. Challenges of the research: The challenges, descriptions, and solutions are given in the following table: Challenges Description Solution Support from JCUS JCUS did not allow me to take interviews of the students. I interacted through questionnaire during the lecture. I focused more on the questionnaire and tried to gather as much knowledge as possible. Time constraints I was not able to visit more than one university and gather more students opinions. Besides, i could not reach to various app stores and conduct market research. I tried to reach as many students as possible within JCUS. I tried to reach to socio-economic and culturally diverse students to include different perceptions in my study. Lack of preparation I could not prepare well and extensively because of my lack of understanding on the subject and lack of updated resources. In addition, i had to study other subjects. I focused on the theories that i found in the literary resources concerning usage of application software and link them to the students opinions. Lack of support from my friends I did not get much support from my friends. I asked to know about their usages of educational apps but they could not manage time for me. I did my study individually. I took support of literacy resources and internet websites. Two critical challenges and solutions: Among the challenges that i have mentioned, the most difficult part of the research was to overcome time constraint and lack of support from JCUS. I felt that I was left with insufficient data for my research work. I will discuss further, how I faced these two most critical challenges. Lack of support from JCUS: I expected that JCUS would support me to conduct the research the way i wanted it to be. However, JCUS did not give me enough time and in addition; they did not allow me to do interact with the students individually. I planned an open-ended interview with at least two students. It is a fact that open-ended interviews help us know about the unknown aspects of the topic. Sometimes, we set the questionnaire as per our understanding of the subject. I also learnt about the educational apps from various books and websites and then set my questionnaire according to the research objectives. However, I found that it restricted my study. JCUS authority only allowed me a session with the students in which, they answered the questions set by me and that is also within the lecture session. I found the students were in a hurry. They just read and marked the answers. Even, I could not able to know much about the socio-economic background of them. Before conducting the res earch, i read many journals and books and found that the socio-economic and cultural background of the students leave an impact on the rate of usages of the educational apps. There are many apps that remove the linguistic barriers of the foreign students. Therefore, it was important for me to interact more with the foreign students to know whether they are aware of such educational apps or not. I required knowing whether these apps actually remove such barriers are not. The lack of support from JCUS did not enable me to reach at the core of the subject. I had to accept the rules and regulations of JCUS and do my study according to the availability of the resources. Therefore, I focused more on the questionnaire. When i came to know that i was not permitted to take individual interviews, I changed my plan and set my questionnaire focusing on various aspects of the educational apps. I included questions related to the demography of the students, the rate of usages, their knowledge about educational apps. Although the research is not an extensive one, yet I had to gather information about who are using what kind of apps. I read some previous research works and tried to know point of views of majority people and the trends found in the most students. I took help of my professor and learnt about various issues. Thus, I tried to overcome this challenge. Time constraints: It was major challenge for me while doing the research. It is related to many issues. I had to conduct the study within a limited time. Therefore, I could not do many things. I could not visit more than one university and limited my study within JCUS. I felt it left me with insufficient data. I was required to know different perspectives of various students. Again, I thought that it was important to know how much the universities encourage the students to use educational apps. I could not gather much information about it because of the lack of time. It was important for me to know what the marketers are doing for encouraging the sales. As I did not have much time, I could not reach the app stores or to the software companies to know about the current trends of business and their perspectives. While going through various literatures, I realized that the marketers could influence the buyers through various promotional activities. Therefore, it was important to underst and how much the students are encouraged by them to use the educational apps. As I did not have that time, i could not visit those places. Again, it was important to know about the target customers. I could not gather enough data regarding it. Time constraint restricted my research from analyzing the subject from a different perspective after reading a lot. Even, I could not visit libraries regularly and collect as many data as possible. I could not read much theories as it required more time to read them and understand them. I needed more time because i have not done any research related to educational apps previously. It was a new topic for me and i needed to read and communicate extensively. However, i had to overcome this challenge anyhow. I knew my limitations and planned my study keeping the time constraints in mind. My professor helped me a lot. He encouraged me to talk to professors of other universities over telephone. Again, I divided the available times and did specific works in particular times. As in could not visit many universities, I read about them over internet and gathered information apart from the telephonic conversation. Whenever I come to know about anything related to my subject, I noted it down for further use. As I could not read extensively, I bought some of the educational apps and by using them; I tried to understand their effectiveness. It did not take much time and solved many of my queries. Some managers of reputed companies agreed for a telephonic communication. I talked to them to know their perspective as much as possible. The obvious strategy was to relate the marketing perspectives with the perspective of the users. Therefore, I tried to gather knowledge from various resources. I noted down both types of information whenever I found them and made a list of it so that I can use them during writing. Conclusion I have talked about the challenges and the solutions. All the methods will be helpful in doing such future research works. However, more support from JCUS could have helped me to undertake an extensive research; some telephonic interactions were instrumental in providing me with lots of information.