Chinenye Nwokey Marketing Research and Segementation

Chinenye Nwokey

HCS/539

Steven Briggs

February 9th, 2015

Marketing researches collects and studies the needs and apprehensions of the customer, and then use this information to design a strategy that meets the demands of the customer. Market segmentation is the process of grouping into clusters consumers who have similar wants or needs to which an organization can respond by tailoring one or more elements of the marketing mix (Berkowitz, 2006). The organization of choice for this paper is Doctor’s Hospital located in Northside of Houston, Texas. Doctors Hospital is an acute-care hospital committed to providing continuous quality health-care services to over 500,000 residents in the medically-underserved communities of North Houston. This organization targets those people who are at or below the poverty level by offering services at little to no cost.  It provides medical care services to inpatients, outpatients, and also rehabilitation patients.

 My research method will be both primary and secondary research methods. The collection of primary data is field research. Methods include: experimentation, observation, sampling, consumer panels, retail audits, pre-tests, interviewing, questionnaires, and post-tests.  Questionnaires provide answers to standard questions; these can be by mail, online, or face to face. It normally can cover large number of people, usually one on one and focus on a list of questions. This enables a number of people to discuss ideas or topics together and provide a range of views. Researchers often use secondary research first to know what is already known about a community, which is cheaper than starting up primary research which is very costly. Secondary data is data neither collected directly by the user nor specifically for the user, often under conditions that are now well known to the user. The collection of secondary data for marketing research is known as desk research. Desk research involves collecting data from internal and external sources (records inside the firm – production, inventory, sales volume, marketing, financial.  As a research manager for Doctors’ hospital, survey data collection was more convenient to use.  Telephone interviews, personal interview, focus groups, and mail survey.  Two hundred people between the age of 18 and older were in the survey group.  However, this was not a large group of people based on the population but based on their answers to the questions it appear to be the consensus in the community.  The answers to the questions varied based on the age group.  For example the group with children were more concern about assess to care for their children especially at night and after hours. They complained about long waiting time in the  emergency room at Doctors hospital, and want the hospital to recruit more nurses’ and doctors Sixteen percent of the test group was seniors; they want to have a good pharmacy attached to the hospital, so they can fill their prescription while in the hospital. All respondents had problems with access to health care facility, many complained of having to use the fire department to go to emergency room because they were not able to get to the hospital on their own.  Other complaints were that the Doctors’ hospital has not recruited enough different types of Specialist to the community.