The company Dell Inc. competes in an intense and growing market, with a large number of competitors, however, it is still the number one in direct-sales computer vendor (Malhotra, 2010, p. 774).

Their products and services go through households to enterprise customers in a wide variety like PC and notebooks, network servers, workstations, storage systems, handheld computers, Ethernet switches and so on; diversification is one of its important growth strategies (Egge, 2011).

By the other hand, Dell has a growing customer base; that´s why they are thinking in exploring and eventually use it for selling new products and services like digital music players, LCD television or Dell-branded printers (Malhotra, 2010, p. 774-775).

For that, they will perform a survey of recent purchasers of Dell´s PCs and notebooks to understand their primary usage, Internet habits, satisfaction and loyalty between others. The Formulation of the Research Design has determined that the best way to capture the primary sources from which the information will be collected is descriptive research design like a survey (Zlatev, 2012).

The next step of the process is to make the fieldwork and recollection of the data. In this stage, we have 5 activities or steps to go through: selecting the field workers, training them, supervising them, validating the fieldwork and evaluating the people for an accurate feedback.

In this case we are talking about technology products, with customers that are related with their usage, that’s why it is important who does the interviews. If we think that “the more characteristics the interviewer and the respondent have in common, the grater the probability of a successful interview” (Slatev, 2012), we can see the relationship.

The survey has 14 questions (Malhotra, 2012, p.776-779) and nor being difficult, it asks for very punctual information about technology and its use, that could discourage the rate of responses if the interviewer is very different from the customer (even if the survey is by phone, however in this case we are thinking in a person to person survey).

Besides selecting the correct field interviewers, another complementary action is training these field workers, also concerning about the technology related to Dell´s market. These initiatives can redound in less non-responding error, a major problem in marketing research.

Sources:

Egge, C. (2011,6) Dell Accelerates Its Storage Strategy. Retrieved on February 10, 2012 from http://clausegge.com/2011/06/dell-accelerates-its-storage-strategy/

Zlatev, V. (2012,2). Lecture 9: Fieldwork. Boston University. Retrieved on February 9, 2012 from www.vista.bu.edu

Malhotra, Naresh (2010). Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation, 6th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc