Marketing Research Paper Topics – Understand What Marketing Is First
Marketing has long emerged and evolved from the traditional, old-century methods of taking your products to an actual marketplace to catch the attention of buyers and incentivize them through sheer need, touch-and-feel to buy your product. In this new age, brick-and-mortar storefronts are being replaced by million dollar digital campaigns. Billboards which were popular in the last century have all but been swapped for television, internet ad banners, affiliate marketing, SEO and other tech-driven campaigns.
While the dynamics have changed to encompass new technologies, the primary purpose of marketing is still the same, i.e., “processes for creation, communication, delivery and exchange of offerings that provide value for partners, clients and the society at large” as defined by the American Marketing Association. With this mind, it’s easily discernible that marketing is quite a vast discipline. Writing a heavy research-based paper in this discipline requires that you have access to a wealth of topics that you can easily choose from in case an urgent need arises. This is precisely what this article aims to assist you with.
Not Sure How to Select the Best Marketing Research Paper Topic? Start Here
While the provided definition by the AMA might not satisfactorily tell you what marketing really is, you should know that marketing always revolves around identifying and satisfying customer demands in a way that is profitable, through providing new exchange offerings. Investopedia refers to the four “Ps” of marketing, as:
- Pricing, e., determining how much a product will sell for while considering marketing costs, distribution expenses, and profitability based on unit costs.
- Product, e., what will be sold and how is this product differentiated from other substitutes in the market?
- Place refers to how the product will be sold, g., online, monetized apps or physical storefronts.
- Promotion, i.e., a marketing and exchange campaign that depends on the product lifecycle and includes advertising, personal selling, sales promotions, etc.
Thus, when choosing a topic, your paper will revolve around one or more of these four “Ps,” with subsets in different marketing domains such as internet and digital marketing, micro and macro trends, marketing research and segmentation, etc. The topic should be something within the scope of your own understanding, and you should be able to adequately tackle the research question at your own level, and with adequate examples or a case study.
List of Marketing Research Paper Topics | 5 Great Choices for You
Choosing the best research topic is usually the hardest part of working on a paper, after all, there’s so much to read and write about. Your marketing paper will require you to test class theories in actual real-world environments or on credible secondary data. Ideally, you should define a problem, develop a plan for research with adequate methodology, provide a theoretical framework for collecting and analyzing the data, and provide your own guided interpretation of this data.
Since it takes a lot of time and energy to come up with an excellent topic for a marketing research paper, here are a few that you can digest as you figure out your own way forward:
- Breaking into China: How Didi Chuxing defied Uber’s clout and drove the Silicon Valley giant from Beijing’s streets.
- Exploring why LinkedIn leads provide such a high ROI compared to Facebook and Twitter
- The reason why Facebook has resorted to using traditional billboards to overcome its negative publicity
- Mobile phone marketing vs. traditional storefronts: A case study of Microsoft.
- Marketing in recession: Give a case study of a company that successfully rolled out a product post the 2008 global financial crisis.
These topics provide global coverage and insights and are bound to impress your teacher.
10 Insightful Marketing Research Paper Questions
Deciding what the scope and nature of your study will be is difficult, especially if you don’t have any particular area of interest already in mind. With the following research questions in marketing, you can make good headway and save valuable time:
- How has relationship banking been affected by the promotion of digital and mobile money accessibility?
- How has the proposed Brexit impacted consumer buying behavior in both the EU and the UK?
- How has PEPSI’s ad featuring Kylie Jenner impacted sales of its product within the black demographic?
- Should companies which make use of mobile marketing be held partially liable for addictive or maniacal consumer behavior?
- How effectively can CSR be used as a brand marketing tool?
- Has the ROI in athletes as a brand marketing tool proved successful?
- How much of customer satisfaction can be attributed to website attributes? A case study of Adobe and Slack
- With the digital transformation, are marketing budgets still justified?
- The “Black Friday” phenomenon: Is it a psychological marketing gimmick or does it offer real value for money?
- How does marketing affect production expenditure?
You can adapt these questions to your own situation and standard, depending on what data is available to you.
7 Advanced Marketing Research Paper Ideas
Here are a few more research paper ideas that you can apply for your own paper:
- A comparison of sales numbers for two companies offering the same product under different packaging and branding.
- How fast do marketing campaigns impact user behavior? A case study of the Xbox 360 from concept, advertising, roll out to first purchase.
- How does traveling abroad impact consumer behavior for purchasing products manufactured locally?
- A SWOT analysis for the upcoming Tesla Model S.
- Limiting compulsive buying behaviors in credit card holders.
- The Internet of Things: Bringing marketing to everything we touch.
- Nike and Colin Kaepernick: Brand failure or marketing genius?
We hope these and all the other topics we’ve provided will help get you started on writing that excellent research paper. If you need extra help with writing your research paper, always feel free to consult us!