RAI102 Research & Insight

Research Design (Research Proposal) Suggested Outline

Students nominate an area of interest from business, advertising or digital media, then design and develop a research proposal to conduct primary and secondary research to determine a consumer need, product or digital media project opportunity, or need for a communications campaign.

Research Propsal

Background

Describe the business problem you are trying to solve. You may outline the symptoms you have observed but state the business problem that you believe exists and that you want to investigate through the research project you are proposing.

In addition to an explanation of the problem, your background should provide some context to the area of interest you are researching. You should describe the consumer need it fulfils and how well it does this.

You may have already conducted some secondary research that can provide some background and direction for your research proposal and you should include a brief discussion of findings here.

Business and Project Objectives

Describe the business objective in a few simple statements. This could be to increase sales, attract customers or increase awareness. Be a specific as you can. You should also explain the purpose of the research or expected research outcomes. Consider what decisions the research will help the business make such as, improve a product, create an advertising campaign or improve brand competitiveness.

Research Objectives

Market research objectives follow the business and project objectives. Make clear your research aims and information needs. A few simple statements is all that is needed and they are likely to begin with the word “To” e.g. “To determine consumer perceptions of our product value.”

Here it is helpful to list the broad questions the need answering, for example, how do consumers perceive our product relative to our competitors? These are not the specific survey questions that you will ask but the broad questions that you want to know the answer to.

Research Method

Outline the envisaged method, scope of work, sample and key areas in the research design.

You should outline any secondary research you will access as well as describe the method you will use to conduct primary research.

In this project you will use a convenience sample of friends and family so this will limit the areas, markets, customer groups you will include but you should describe the sample from the perspective of the business.

Depending upon how well defined your problem your are likely to be conducting either exploratory research or descriptive research (not causal research) due to the nature of this assessment task and you availability of knowledge. In this section, you should briefly describe how this research method will help achieve the research objectives.

You will be asked to use Survey Monkey as the research tool to conduct your research so this should be stated here. Because you will use the free version you are limited to 10 questions that you can ask so you should point this out as a limitation of the research design.

Expected Outcomes

Here you should state what your research project is expected to deliver. It should refer back to the business and research objectives and summarise how the insights gained from the research will help make the business decisions you have already explained and how this will impact the business for the future if the outcome is successful.