Marketing Research

1.a

From the case description we conclude that the research question is mainly focused on analyzing the factors that influence the sales in units of Brand A. In other words, by finding out which factors influence the sales in units of Brand A, we find out how meaningful the marketing efforts were of the managers. In order to evaluate and analyze the managers' assumptions we design complementary hypotheses which are useful to address the problem regarding sales in units of Brand A. Every manager has different assertions resulting in three different hypotheses.

Manager X tells us that "he skillfully took advantage of the European Soccer Championships, from week 23 to 26 in 2006, in order to boost the sales in units of Brand A". "At that time he was responsible for the marketing strategy of Brand A". In other words, manager X believes that there is a boost in sales in the weeks 23 to 26 in 2006 and that this increase in sales is solely and only caused by his marketing efforts. What are his marketing efforts? He believes that he successfully linked Brand A with the European Soccer Championships in the mentioned weeks that the event occurred. This means that according to manager X we should see an increase in sales in units that is solely caused by the advertising campaign that was going on at that time and that the increase of sales is not caused by anything else. It is noteworthy to mention that there is no specific data or information on the advertising related to the Championship. Therefore it is quite difficult to research the assertion of manager X. One way to solve this problem is by looking only at the increase in sales and whether there is a significant increase in sales in the mentioned weeks or not. However, for manager X, we will have a more general hypothesis due to the ambiguous reasoning of the manager.