What is Experimental Research in Marketing?
Experimental research is a scientific process of testing our hypotheses by controlling, manipulating, and measuring a set of variables.
Our hypotheses are really just our ideas about how things work or why people do something. So, with experimental research, we want to find out if we’re right or not. The way we do that is by controlling certain variables called control variables. In other words, we keep certain things constant so that we know those are not the things that are driving the behavior or whatever outcome we expect.
We keep those control variables the same, and then we change other variables or we manipulate what we call independent variables. So, maybe we change the price of our product but we keep all the features of the product the same.
So those features would be control variables – because we don’t want to try different types of product at different prices. We would not know if the difference in sales is coming from the different features or the different price. But, if we keep all the features the same, that’s our control variable. We change the price or manipulate the price – that’s our independent variable. Then we measure the outcome or the dependent variable. By doing that ,we can figure out what’s really driving differences in sales. Is it the price change or is it something else.
So by either keeping things constant or controlling them and then manipulating other things, we can determine what’s really driving outcomes. That’s the goal of experimental research.
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