Need Help With My Mba Marketing Project Report?
I am doin my internship in a manufacturing company making Diesel engine parts mainly for tractors. The task given to me by the company is to use the internet and identify potential customers (Diesel engine/tractor OEMs & spare parts distributors) in the export market (no geographical restrictions).Then contact them and if possible to try and get an rfq from them. I have given my project title as “export potential for my firm’s products in the international tractor OE and after sales markets” but am not able to get any (secondary)data or market research reports onthe net.I also doubt if a questionnaire would work because all are foreign companies and they are not even responding to my emails which i am sending on behalf of my company.
Can you please suggest how to go about obtaining data for the project report for this study and is there any website where i could find marketing project reports?Also is there any other approach i can take (other than export potential ) to do my study?
October 26th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
One common mistake that many students do is ‘follow the title of the project’. The title can be changed (& in most cases, it wil be changed) any time during the project (generally towards the completion). Your objectives might have been framed by now, so just follow them & acheive them. If you find any difficulties in acheiving a particular task, just drop it unless its the spine of the project (it sounds bad but in reality, the time period given to you to finish your project would be limited to do everything). Towards the completion just review what you have done & the title would come up automatically. Eg: I started my project with TQM, but due to time limitations & unavailbilty of required data, it turned into ‘Quality of work life’ i.e, I could complete only a portion of TQM & that little portion was my report.
For the secondary data, you need not always have a questionnarire as the data collecting tool. Try to get information from the websites of those companies, from the previous records of your company (what kind of companies it catered to earlier would help you find similar companies (potential companies)).
The data you require or the tools depend largely upon the type or nature of your research study. For example if the study is exploratory in nature, you dont actually need a questionnaire. Data can be obtained through observation. A silly example would be, say if you want to know the number of men voting at a particular poll booth you need not have a questionnaire asking the respondents about their gender. You can simply have the data through your observation.
All that I can say is just start your work, keep a watch over the deadlines.
You can find reports on http://www.ssrn.com