Erik Cartman just took a new position with Colorado Research, Inc. Erik's first customer, the president of a local bank, wanted a bank image study to be conducted measuring not only the client's bank's image, but that of his competitors as well. In designing the research project, Erik talked to several of his friends one night about how they viewed their banks. Erik charged the client for this and billed it as "Exploratory Research—Focus Group." The next day Erik tried to remember most of what his friends had told him. Some of the issues were "closeness to home" of branch locations, "cool online banking," and "friendly tellers." Erik took these issues, made up some of his own and put them into a semantic differential scale format. After the research study, Erik wrote a report and referred to the semantic differential scale he devised as a "Standard Marketing Research Scale to Measure the Construct of Bank Image." What Erik did was:
A) correct; he used exploratory research to generate most of the items for his measurement of bank image.
B) correct; although he used some of his own opinions, they were based upon experience and he did make use of a focus group.
C) incorrect; the measurement of bank image was incorrect as bank image should be measured only by using Likert scales.
D) incorrect; we do not know if the scale Mr. Cartman devised was valid or reliable, but he was unethical in presenting the measurement as "standard marketing research."
E) correct; Erik saved considerable time and money by creating his own measurement of the construct.
Answer: D) incorrect; we do not know if the scale Mr. Cartman devised was valid or reliable, but he was unethical in presenting the measurement as "standard marketing research."