| Given the abundance of marketing research information now available from Internet sources, professional marketing researchers increasingly turn to these sources to help formulate or test marketing decisions. The importance of marketing decisions to organizational success requires the information used in making such decisions to be valid and reliable. Accurately identifying the nature of a population, its disposition to purchase a good or service, or trends in a target market are some of the goals of marketing research .; This research examines what factors influence professional marketing researchers' decisions to accept or reject Internet-sourced data. In addition to posing this question directly, this research also examines when this information is used, as it seems likely to be a corroborating factor in how decision-makers assess the value and importance of such information. An extensive review of the literature found studies on Internet-based sources of secondary information to be quite limited, either mostly opinion-based in trade journals or dealing with information in general.; This empirical study was conducted in two phases. First, intensive interviews with 20 senior professional researchers led to the completion of a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) analysis designed to identify and rank in importance the criteria researchers use to evaluate web-based information. The second phase was an Internet-based survey of the membership of the Marketing Research Association, an organization of professional marketing researchers. This survey provided statistical support for the relative importance of the factors (inferred from usefulness ratings) for each of the criteria highlighted in the QFD analysis.; Using these tools, it was determined that the most important characteristics of information to professional researchers include the currency of the data (recency and frequency of update), the scope of the information (how closely it matches the population of interest to the researcher) and the independence and objectivity of the source of the data. Further, the study determined that, as the importance or riskiness of the decision for which the data will be used increases, the more rigorous is researchers' evaluation of the information and its source.; This study also develops the concept of an Information Assessment Filter that researchers use to select the information they choose to use in their research projects, and which information they choose not to use. This study also demonstrates for the first time how a QFD analysis can be used in a service oriented business, in this case, to link what the web designer controls to what the website visitor receives.; The research also found that these professional researchers' believe that the Internet is becoming a more important and useful source of information. However, since their work is mostly devoted to primary research, they use the information from the web most often to corroborate previous information or for preliminary investigations. |
