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Topic: Student Questions

Dissertation Topic Query

Posted by Anonymous on 5/30/2009 at 10:28 PM ET 250 Points
I am a student at the university of Liverpool pursuing an MBA and I'm planning to do my dissertation in the background of Marketing. I would plead to you help me find a good topic for this research as I'm really confused as to what is a good topic for me as most of them have been taken up by early researchers. I want my topic to be new as my professor wants it to be unique. Please help me out on this as soon as possible !!!!!!!!!!
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  • Posted by wnelson on 5/30/2009 at 11:51 PM Accepted
    Picking an "catchy" topic to impress your professor is a bad way to choose and it's even worse to have a bunch of strangers to "throw out ideas." Your dissertation topic should be for YOU, not your prof. You will live with your dissertation for a long time. It's not a weekend book report. You had better love the topic yourself or you will quickly lose interest and gloss over it versus dig in and enjoy every hour you work on it. If you are fascinated by the topic, your reader will be fascinated. Further, the dissertation is the capstone of your MBA so it's your last chance in your learning process to hone a skill. Further, it's a chance for you to pick a topic about which to learn. Every other course in your MBA has been chosen for you, more or less. Also, give some thought to where you are going to take your career after the MBA. Are you looking to be a B2B or a B2C marketer? If B2B, will you and in a systems business, component business, or service business? Choose your topic related to where you want to end up. It will give you an edge in that field.

    After you give some thought to this, then get back to us with those thoughts and we can discuss where you might take it for a dissertation.

    I hope this helps.

    Wayde
  • Posted on 5/30/2009 at 11:57 PM Author
    Hi Wayde,
    Thanks a lot for the great suggestion. I was an Assistant Restaurant Manager in the service industry and during my course I was very much interested in the guerilla marketing and the viral marketing tchniques. I chose this topic as I'm very enthusiastic about it. Could you help me out with the topic as I'm not able to find many books related to this topic and especially theories based on this form of marketing.

    Thanks,
    Sarabpreet
  • Posted by wnelson on 5/31/2009 at 12:41 PM Member
    Sarabpreet,

    First, I can’t believe you can’t find books on guerilla marketing. There are only about a million…where did you look? Here’s a listing from Amazon:
    https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords...
    Look through them and titles you see, go to your library with title, author, and ISBN number and they should be able to order it from another library if they don’t have it. For viral marketing, it’s the same thing:
    https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords...
    Besides these books, I am positive you can find hundreds, if not thousands of papers from scholarly and peer reviewed journals. When I searched on EBSCOhost for “guerilla marketing,” there were 37 results. For “viral marketing,” there were 84. I believe you will find plenty of source to formulate a dissertation.

    One thing you may not find is specifically, “The use of Viral Marketing as a Guerilla Marketing Technique for the Service Industry and Restaurants.” But, then, if you could find THAT paper, your dissertation would be a book report, not a dissertation. A dissertation should plow new ground. You do this by looking at the industry and how marketing is done today. Mostly coupons, right? So how can that industry take advantage of guerilla marketing and viral marketing? First, look at what these two areas cover and formulate a definition. Then, look at how these techniques are used effectively in other industries, and maybe where they have not been effective and why. Based on this, propose techniques to use for your selected industry. Either choose restaurants, specifically or service industry generally. The more general you go, the harder your paper becomes, however. If you choose service industry, you have to abstract the characteristics of that industry across all service industry professions and then posit techniques that work for all. As this becomes very general, the techniques that can be used across all in any situation become very limited – and you may not find one, or the paper becomes how to use all techniques – and then it’s not very interesting. If you can actually do some “primary research” – like test some techniques on people in a “focus group” setting (this could be simply one-on-one interviews or a group of people looking at possible marketing using the techniques), then a survey across, say, 380 consumers (that would be statistically significant – 95% sure that the results are within +/-5% of the actual population), and then have a restaurant try the resultant techniques and you can discuss the results, this would be an excellent paper. And this would provide you with excellent tools as you enter into the marketplace as an MBA grad.

    Wayde
  • Posted on 5/31/2009 at 11:49 PM Author
    Thanks a lot Wayde great suggestions especially about the part in which there is less material based on guerilla marketing in the service sector.I am confident now after speaking to you about this and I'm going to give a thumbs up to this. Can i send you my draft dissertation proposal tto have a look at it. Thanks a tonne.

    Cheers,
    Sarabpreet
  • Posted by wnelson on 6/1/2009 at 3:23 PM Member
    Yes, of course you may. My email address is in my profile.

    Wayde
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