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5.3.2 Research Proposal detailed description of assessment (2,500 words)You are required to submit the proposal for your research investigation leading to the final Project.(1) Introduction (220 words)Start your work from a provisional title explaining your research direction and a single paragraph (nottoo long) introducing the area/problem you intend to research, including aspects of it that are relevantto the following discussion.

(2) Key literature and theoretical background of the topic of investigation (800 words)What is already known on your topic? What theories and concepts are relevant to the topic? Makesure you give adequate consideration to the classics in your topic area, the landmarks, and the mostrecent developments. What policy or business implications have been derived out of this? What gapsin knowledge remain to be addressed? What is your proposed research question?Present the key literature in critical manner, either chronologically (tracing the development of thefield over time) or comparing similarities and differences between authors and schools of thought.

(3) Methodological Choice Justifications (900 words)In this part of the proposal you are required to provide a critical reflection on the key methodologicalapproaches used in a chosen area of investigation and justify your own methodological choices.In order to successfully complete part 3 you are advised to:Find a number of good quality refereed academic articles in your field of research where authorsdescribe and justify their methodological approaches well (not less than 5); Critically review themethods that have been used by researchers (identify and cite the articles individually) and decidewhich are relevant to your research and justify why they are relevant. With regards to the articles youfeel are not relevant, explain why they are not relevant (If you decide none are relevant, say why theyare not relevant and how you intend to proceed under the circumstances – careful, this is a hardposition to defend!). Those articles which you declared ‘not relevant’ do not count towards requiredminimum of sources for review. When criticizing clearly name the approaches, methodologies andmethods as those are known in the academic literature. Review how researchers in the field approachsetting research questions; search, present and analyze data. Reflect on whether researchers areindependent (of)/involved (in) their research subjects. Relate what you say to your own proposedresearch investigation in detail. Since this is an early stage in your research this might involve someguesswork on your part as to what your research will consist of. Please don’t worry about this becausespeculation will assist in your critical reflection. Nobody is going to hold you to any choices orarguments you make at this stage. The point is to test your awareness and understanding of themethodological issues relevant to your research. Be critical of your own position – a reflexiveawareness of the difficulties of any approach/position is more important (in this assignment) thantrying to defend any particular position. Throughout the text refer specifically to the sources you haveread and the positions/arguments you form by using the Harvard referencing style.BUSI 1604, Foundations of Scholarship and Research 2015-1616

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(4) Draft of the Research Instrument (600 words)In this part you are required to design a draft of your proposed questionnaire or interview questions /answer options based on research question of interest. This part should not be longer than 1000words.• If you intend to use a questionnaire, make sure you draft the key questions and optionanswers in a clear and readable style (at all time, think of your potential respondents);• If you intend to use an interview, develop the questions and briefly explain what kind ofanswers you are hoping to receive from your potential respondents;• If you propose to use secondary data, you need to be very specific which data sources ordatabases you are going to use, what kind of data you intend to find and how you are going tointerrogate it.(5) Expected Findings (100 words)What is it that you are wishing to find as a result of your research? Evaluate strong and potentiallyweak points within the investigation? Will you have sufficient and good quality date to make relevantconclusions? Is there a future direction to your investigation?

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Sample research proposal format

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Foundation of Scholarship and Research: Research proposal | MBA International Business.

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CONTENT MARKETIN

G:

Evaluating impacts on brand credibility and equity of Indian eCommerce brands in the last decade.

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Contents

Coursework Header Sheet....................................................................................................................................1

Introduction:............................................................................................................................................................4

Research question and purpose:..........................................................................................................................4

Literature review:....................................................................................................................................................4

Behavioural:........................................................................................................................................................6

Essential:.............................................................................................................................................................6

Strategic:.............................................................................................................................................................7

Targeted:.............................................................................................................................................................7

Theoretical gap....................................................................................................................................................8

Empirical Research:.................................................................................................................................................8

Research design:..................................................................................................................................................8

Exploratory case study design:...........................................................................................................................9

Data collection methods:.......................................................................................................................................9

Semi-structured interviews:.............................................................................................................................10

Virtual observation:........................................................................................................................................10

Research instrument:..........................................................................................................................................10

Conclusion:...........................................................................................................................................................12

Reference:.............................................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction:

The last decade has witnessed an exponential growth of eCommerce business in all sectors such as lifestyle products,

FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), electronic goods, hospitality, online travel businesses, etc. (Vendon,2013). With

the current growth rate of 8%, eCommerce business in India is expected to grow from $10 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in

2019 (India: Relaxing eCommerce policy, 2014). Moreover, key players like FLIPKART, SNAPDEAL and AMAZON

are more focused on growth as compared to profit making as there is validation of saying “ winner takes it all” in this

business (India's eCommerce poised at $43 billion in 5 years: Meet the key growth leaders, 2014). Turning to the

consumer behaviour in choosing an eCommerce brands, brand equity and credibility puts through a positive impact over

consumers purchasing intention. Due to exorbitant competitiveness within eCommerce business, issues like consumer

loyalty have become a paramount concern for the eCommerce brands. (Wang and Yang, 2010) content marketing is the

new buzz word for eCommerce brands to build their brand equity and credibility by implementing branded content which

is complementary to the products or services in various forms like videos, creative FAQ’s, white papers, webinars, blog

articles, etc. It becomes necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing in building loyal customer base and

to get strategic competitive advantage (Gagnon, 2014).

Research question and purpose:

This exploration will demonstrate the key strategic objectives of the companies while implementing marketing strategy

and the impacts on brand value/equity and credibility by practicing content rich marketing strategy. This research will

explore the key managerial strategies and objectives involved in content planning, creation and distribution, also to

evaluate the effects of content marketing as a marketing strategy over brand equity and credibility of Indian eCommerce

brands. Therefore, to carry out the research following research can be formulated:

How online eCommerce brands use content marketing as a tool to build brand equity and credibility?

This question will be answered by analysing the strategic objectives of content marketing used for eCommerce brands and

impact of content rich marketing over consumer behaviour. Therefore, two derived sub-questions are formulated:

What are the strategic objectives underlying the content marketing process?

What impacts on brand equity and credibility occurred after implementation of content marketing?

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Literature review:

There is no consensus among the scholars about the definite reasons affecting consumer’s purchase decision, but there

exists a common agreement in defining brand equity and credibility as important reasons influencing purchase decision in

positive manner. As Keller (1993) states, purchase decision mostly depends on consumers brand knowledge and presence

of some good, solid, and remarkable brand relationship in memory. In addition, consumer purchase decision is mainly

influenced by brand credibility which is the perceived reliability, expertise, and engaging quality/likeableness of the brand

to the customer which has developed due to company’s past promotional exercises and can impact customers' future

image thought, customer behaviour becomes essential in order to precisely know the attributes of brand which could

enhance its perceived brand credibility (Wang and Yang, 2010). Carrying conclusion from the above literature,

strengthening of the consumer-brand relationship are done by adopting strategy like content marketing which uniquely

qualifies a company to become a thought leader in its market place by providing company’s valuable and proprietary

knowledge to the consumers by media sources such as Case studies and reports, Applications briefs, Books, Trade

publication articles, Articles (self-published), Video presentations, Executive speeches, FAQ files, Software, mobile, and

iPhone apps etc. (Gagnon, 2014).

Figure 1: Facts and figures of content marketing (Demand Metric 2013)

According to Hahn (2013), content marketing serves following benefits to the businesses:

Improves site reputation and search engine optimization

Enables enhancing brand credibility

Leads to positive customer-brand relationship

Avoids dependency on external sources for data

provides an edge to companies by possession of uniqueness in its contents

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In addition, content marketing can be better understood by “The B.E.S.T. formula” of Pulizzi and Barrett (2009). This

formula emphasised the need of possessing a required content strategy by companies before making a transition to

providing original valuable and relevant content. This model could be easily applied over all forms print and online

media.

Figure 2: The B.E.S.T. formula (Pulizzi & Barrett 2009)

Following this model, a company's marketing strategy should be as follows:

Behavioural: To understand the aim of communication.

Essential: To deliver valuable information to target audience.

Strategic: content marketing strategy must complement business strategy and objectives

Targeted: content must be focused, relevant and precisely targeted.

Pulizzi and Barrett (2009) emphasized companies undergo following set of questionnaire to understand to understand their

target audience and objectives in a better way.

Behavioural:

What actually we want customer to feel at emotional level?

What should be the expected outcome from consumer’s behaviour?

What do we want them to do?

How should we track our results?

How to convert leads into sales?

Essential:

What customers want to know?

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How this content or information will benefit them?

How to ensure maximum impact of the message on target audience?

What are the essentials of campaign?

How the information to be conveyed?

Strategic:

Is content marketing strategy complementing business objective?

Is it in accordance to company’s aims and goal?

Targeted:

Whom should we target?

What customer actually wants?

Do we understand our target audience?

Do we understand how they view the product or service we offer?

By answering these questions, businesses will have the necessary information in order

To create a marketing communications strategy that works.

Content marketing can be better understood by The B.E.S.T. formula & The Four Pillar theory

Figure 3: The four pillars of successful content (Tucker 2013).

With regard to eCommerce brands, content rich marketing strategies are widely adopted to drive more consumer traffic.

But there exists a knowledge gap, as very less.

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However, with the shift of paradigm from conventional business to online business in last decade, there has been an

exponential growth of eCommerce business in India. But, with the growing number of eCommerce players within market,

competitiveness has also increased. Further, measures taken by Google by launching Google Penguin software platform

which targets the websites which do not possess user specific content or the content which possess some value for the

user, complying with the aim of Google to serve results best suited to user, websites whose business depends on search

engine traffic are getting affected due to it. It becomes essential for the eCommerce website to rely on content based

marketing in order to remain competitive in online business. Moreover, to gain the maximum market share eCommerce

brands are now emphasizing on content marketing strategy to distinguish, suspect, and fulfil consumer’s requirement

effectively by the means of digital content. Also, brands now acting as publisher, as for now it is very difficult to

differentiate between an editorial and an advertisement due to advent of content based marketing (Basney, 2014).

Theoretical gap

Rowley (2008) states that content marketing is fundamentally concerned with content as a product, subject of marketing

exchange, and the implications that the usage of digital content has on marketing. In addition, the author formulates a

definition of content marketing as being responsible for “(Rowley, 2008a, p.522). However, the authors of this thesis

argue that on the one hand, this definition limits the purpose of content distribution only to profit without considering

other benefits for businesses. Moreover, it also fails to address more specific issues like specific characteristics of content

as such and its scope.

Contents-based marketing activities are already being implemented around the world for years. This paper aims to be one

of the first academic researches to get a better insight of the effectiveness of content rich marketing strategy in building

brand equity and credibility for eCommerce brands.

Empirical Research:

According to Myers (2009), qualitative analysis will be the best suited method for the examination of thesis, due to the

subjective nature of the research question. Furthermore, to understand the strategic objectives, goals, motivations and

understand the people behind the content in a better way, qualitative analysis best serves the purpose (Dabić & Stojanov,

2014). In addition, undergoing data collection from the actors behind the organization is arguably better strategy than

quantitative analysis, as the created digital content is the original natural content of the organisation Qualitative analysis

further helps in getting an in-depth knowledge of objectives, strategies involved in the creation of the original digital

content, also the effects it had on the brand equity and credibility after implementing into practice. As, in this

methodology data is collected from the actors of organizations involved in creating content and that content is interpreted

and analysed by the researchers (Carson et al., 2001). Being a comparatively new marketing technique, in-depth

knowledge about content marketing can be better achieved by carrying out interviews and virtual observations as

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compared to collecting secondary data techniques, as there is not much available previous published research work in this

area (Myers, 2009).

Research design:

Bryman & Bell (2007) highly prioritized usage of effective research design framework and methods of data collection for

achieving desired research objectives.

Exploratory case study design:

As Eisenhardt (1989) states, case studies is a useful tool in getting acquainted with research objectives, relevant theories

and descriptions. Considering the fact that literature related to content marketing are very scarce. Therefore, exploratory

case studies are appropriate in accomplishing research objectives and provide assertive arguments in support. Moreover,

exploratory analysis is often employed on case studies when researcher requires multidimensional rich information of

single or more case studies while meeting its core research objective (Daymon & Holloway, 2002).

Figure: exploratory case study design (Eisenhardt, 1989).

Data collection methods:

With regard to methods of data collection in qualitative analysis, taking interviews are highly preferred among

researchers. There exists, three fundamental sorts of interviews, organized, semi-organized and unstructured interviews.

Here, in this research semi-structured interview methods will be adopted. As it provides the required flexibility of

specifically targeting the important issues and opportunity to gather in-depth knowledge of the required subject, which is

aligned to purpose of understanding the research topic that how content marketing affect brand credibility and equity of

eCommerce brands (Bryman & Bell, 2007).

The second step of data collection process will be virtual observation process, As Malhotra (2010) stated, virtual

observation is practiced to gather required research information by analyzing the behavioural patterns of humans, events

and objects.

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Third step will involve a thorough analysis of the gathered data by semi-structured interview and virtual observation

method. Also, the comparison of changes observed prior and after implementing content marketing strategies over the

organization.

The last step involves summarizing all the findings and outlining the outcomes of research.

Semi-structured interviews:

Interview structure depends on the aims and objectives of research (Easterby-Smith, Thorpe & Jackson, 2008), with due

consideration semi-structured interviews are selected as a method of data collection, as it allows the interviewee to answer

candidly, expressing his thoughts, beliefs and concerns in a better way (Bryman & Bell, 2007).

In order to know the hidden motives behind the actions of respondents, a follow-up question ‘why’ was included after

receiving every answer. This helped in getting a clear picture of every decision or statement made. Further, it helped in

drawing a bigger picture, as this technique helped in involving all the key research questions and fundamentals within

discussion (Easterby‐Smith, Thorpe & Jackson, 2008).

Virtual observation:

This second stage of data collection method involves analysis of empirical data collected from semi-structured interview

method. This method is used for acquiring complementary data which subsequently assists in reaching research objectives

and in-depth understanding of the real phenomenon while, providing valuable and meaningful data to marketing team and

management of the organisation (Carson et al., 2001, p.151).

Research instrument:

In my research work, the research instrument used is semi-structured interviews and the virtual observation of the result

obtained from the interviews. The internal management of FLIPKART is not hierarchy based. Moreover, the marketing

team within FLIPKART does not work in isolation but rather it is closely integrated and linked with other departments

like product development and sales department. To get substantial data for my research would I would strategise a semi-

structured interview with the Campaign Manager of FLIPKART, as he is solely responsible for day to day execution of

content creation, strategic planning and execution.

Topic Questions

Content characteristics How content can be used to build brand

equity?

Content as an educational material How FLIPKART uses content to improve

brand awareness among customers?

Which communication channels,

FLIPKART primary uses to create brand

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awareness?

Marketing strategy What types of marketing strategy

FLIPKART rely on?

Does FLIPKART follow consumer –

centric approach or company-focused

approach?

What is the purpose of content marketing

strategy for FLIPKART?

What type of content marketing technique

does FLIPKART use?

How do FLIPKART strategise its content

planning, creation and execution?

How does FLIPKART strategise its

content to be published?

How does FLIPKART strategise its

content distribution?

Why FLIPKART rely more on content

marketing instead of advertising?

How does your team track the results of

content marketing campaign?

How important is social media platform for

FLIPKART to drive customer for purchase

on website?

What is the Return of investment of over

content marketing?

How effective had been the content

marketing strategy in increasing previous

year’s revenue?

How important it is for FLIPKART to

manage uniqueness in content compared

with its competitor?

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conent What type of content marketing strategy

does FLIPKART use to drive more

consumer traffic?

Consumer behaviour Who is your target audience while creating

digital content?

How do you engage consumer with your

content, to convert leads into sales?

How do you enhance brand credibility and

equity with your content?

Conclusion:

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Reference:

BASNEY, B 2014, 'Brands as publishers: Using content and paid media to fuel a brand transformation', Journal

Of Brand Strategy, 3, 2, pp. 101-110, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 28 March 2015

Bryman, A. & Bell, E. (2007). Business Research Methods, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Carson, D., Gilmore, A., Perry, C. & Gronhaung, K. (2001). Qualitative Marketing Research, Sage: London

Dabić, T, & Stojanov, Ž 2014, 'TECHNIQUES FOR COLLECTING QUALITATIVE FIELD DATA IN

EDUCATION RESEARCH: EXAMPLE OF TWO STUDIES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FILED',

Singidunum Journal Of Applied Sciences, pp. 362-367, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 29

March 2015

Demand Metric, 13 May 2013. Content Marketing Infographic. Demand Metric Blog.

URL: http://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic. Accessed 13 May 2013.

Erdoğmuş, I.E. & Çiçek, M. (2012). The impact of social media marketing on brand loyalty, Social and

Behavioural Sciences, vol. 58, pp.1353‐1360

Gagnon, E 2014, 'Goodbye, B2B Brand Marketing: Developing Content-Based Marketing Programs for the Post-

Marketing Era', International Management Review, 10, 2, pp. 68-73, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost,

viewed 27 March 2015.

Hahn, J. 28 Jan 2013. Why Businesses Should Use Content Marketing. DMConfidential Blog. URL:

http://www.dmconfidential.com/why-businesses-shoulduse- content-marketing/. Accessed 4 Mar 2013.

'India: Relaxing eCommerce policy' 2014, International Financial Law Review, p. 15, Business Source Premier,

EBSCOhost, viewed 27 March 2015

Malhotra, N. K. (2010). Marketing Research – An Applied Orientation, 6th edn., Pearson Education: 2010

(Global Edition)

Myers, M. 2009. Qualitative Research in Business & Management. SAGE Publications Ltd. UK.

Keller, K. (1993). Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity. Journal

of Marketing, 57(1), p.1.

Pulizzi, J. & Barrett N. 2009. Get content, get customers: Turn prospects into buyers with content

marketing. 1st edition. McGraw-Hill.

Rowley, J. (2008). Understanding digital content marketing. Journal of Marketing Management, 24(5-

6), pp.517-540.

Rowley, J. (2004). Online branding, Online Information Review, vol. 28, no. 2, pp.131-138

Vendio 2013, 'Start Up a Successful eCommerce Business', Home Business Magazine: The Home-

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Based Entrepreneur's Magazine, 20, 5, pp. 14-52, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 27

March 2015

Wang, X. and Yang, Z. (2010). The Effect of Brand Credibility on Consumers’ Brand Purchase

Intention in Emerging Economies: The Moderating Role of Brand Awareness and Brand Image. Journal

of Global Marketing, 23(3), pp.177-188.

Wang, X. and Yang, Z. (2010). The Effect of Brand Credibility on Consumers’ Brand Purchase

Intention in Emerging Economies: The Moderating Role of Brand Awareness and Brand Image. Journal

of Global Marketing, 23(3), pp.177-188.

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