American Idol - a Big Hit for Marketing Research

Question One

Marcello and Litzenbergerer felt it was important to conduct this study because they wanted to demonstrate that improving decision making is what effective market research is all about.  Market research is often viewed as impractical by their prospective client companies, and the American Idol study would help them present evidence to skeptics of professional market research without compromising the privacy of previous clients.

Question Two

The main purpose of Marcello and Litzenberger’s study was to demonstrate the usefulness of market research to prospective clients.  The key question they wanted to answer is “What still needs to be known about the viewers and voters for contestants of the popular TV show American Idol?”  This type of research had not been conducted in the past to gain more insight into American Idol viewers, and what their actual motivations are for voting for the contestants.

Question Three

Some of the key questions Marcello and Litzenberger wanted to address were:

• What is the age demographic of viewers voting for American Idol contestants?
• What are the motivations behind viewers voting for American Idol contestants?
• What percent of the United States adult population is voting for American Idol contestants?

Finding the answers to these questions could be important market research data to the sponsors of Amercian Idol, such as Coca Cola and Ford.  These companies spend millions of dollars in advertising each season of American Idol, and they could find it meaningful to know if it’s primarily pre-teen girls doing the voting or a mixture of the adult population.

Question Nine

The first three steps of the marketing research process are evident in this case study.  First, Marcello and Litzenbergerer defined the problem that market research is often viewed as not being useful or valuable to prospective clients.  

Once they had defined their main problem, they moved on to the second step and developed an approach to their problem.  Marcello and Litzenberger wanted to find a way to demonstrate the importance of market research to potential clients without compromising the privacy of past clients and the results of those studies.  By conducting their own market research project around American Idol viewership they could demonstrate the importance of market research and its value to potential new clients, without compromising the confidentiality of previous clients and their studies.  

Finally, Marcello and Litzenberger formulated their research design.  Research design formulation is the framework for conducting their market research project, and it detailed the procedures for obtaining their required information (Malhotra & Dash, 2016).  They decided to incorporate six research questions into the Opinion Research Corporation’s telephone survey as part of other companies’ surveys.  They would sample 1,045 adults over the age of 18 comprising of an equal split of males and females.  They felt that with a total sample of more than 1,000, this would be sufficient evidence to report their results with 95% certainty.