Assignment Guidelines Weighting 35%. 1500 words You are the Australian marketing manager of Masters Home Improvements. Masters was created as a way for Woolworths (who are part owners) to enter the hardware retail space, which has been historically dominated by Bunnings Warehouse and is owned by rival Wesfarmers. Masters has 49 stores Australia wide (one in Adelaide) and you can also buy online. They sell a mixture of both DIY and white goods. You want to commission market research to gain an understanding of how well the Masters brand is performing in terms of mental and physical availability and customer satisfaction. You are interested in evaluating both your physical and online shopping offering. In this assignment, you need to develop an outline of the research brief you will give to providers. Task 1. Identify the key research objectives for the project and what issues/questions need to be examined for each; 2. Recommend and discuss a research approach you feel most appropriate to answer each objective (qualitative or quantitative or both), 3. Recommend a research method (phone survey, face to face interview, focus group etc) for each research objective and explain the reasons for your recommendation; and 4. Outline the respondent recruitment criteria (eg lives within 5km of a store) needed for each research objective. Clearly explain and justify the criteria you have chosen. Please remember that the discussion has to be applied to the Masters scenario. Textbook- like general discussions about pros and cons of various methods (e.g. "there are three main methods of qualitative research") will be heavily penalised. The following marking criteria will be used to assess you work: Ability to apply concepts to the scenario given (20%) Identification of the research objectives (20%) Recommendation and justification for research approach (15%) Recommendation and justification for research method (20%) Recruitment criteria (20%) Presentation, clarity and correct referencing (5%) Assignment Guidelines This assignment is testing your understanding of many of the key principles covered in his course. It is a chance to showcase that you have understood and can apply them To answer this assignment you will need to use your course readings, lectures, textbook, and tutorials. However, this is an applied assignment so you will not find the answer to the assignment written anywhere. Please use the textbook as a minimum for references to support your discussion. Headings and dot points are encouraged. A key objective of this assignment is expressing yourself clearly and concisely so please stay within the word limit (plus or minus 10%) Penalties will apply if you exceed 1500 words by too much . The thing to focus on is answering the assignment questions and demonstrating understanding of the concepts and ability to APPLY them to the scenario You do not need to contact the organisation directly to complete this assignment, but you will need to show you have done some basic research on the organisation and thought about the industry the company is in. Objectives - This is to test of you can translate a management problem into a clearly articulated research objective Target respondents – this part of the discussion is testing that you know who needs to be included in research to meet the research objectives. In some scenarios the broad respondent group is quite obvious (or stated), so you do need to explain if you would split this broader group into sub groups and why this would help. Approach –this shows that you understand broad research approach hes that are suited to different research objectives, scenarios, issues and desired outputs. Method – this part of the assignment is where you discuss options based on the availability of respondents, time constraints of the project, nature of the data sought etc Respondent selection – this shows that you understand issues of sampling other tips Structure your discussion by assignment task (i.e. by question) . Make sure you address all parts of the task in your answer.