Marketing Case Study Of The Mayo Clinic's Foreign Market

The Mayo Clinic is looking to expand their international sales revenues by 100 percent, over the next five years. In order to effectively expand their clinic, it is imperative that Mayo Clinic understands foreign markets and how they operate. Foreign research greatly differs from domestic research. " The basic difference between domestic and foreign market research is the broader scope needed for foreign research, necessitated by higher levels of uncertainty.......... a countries political stabilty, cultural attributes, and geographical characteristics are some of the kinds of things that are not ordinarily gathered by domestic marketing research but they are required for a sound assessment of a foreign market." (cateroa 321) To successfully

Primary data is data collected specifically for the task at hand. Whereas " Secondary data is the data that has been already collected and readily available from other sources. Such data is cheaper and more quickly obtainable than the primary data and also may be available when primary data can not be obtained at all."(management study guide) However, there are some draw backs to secondary data. The United States is known as an MDC.( more developed country) Therefore the amount of secondary data we have is unmatched in other countries." In many countries, substantial data collection has been initiated only recently" (cateroa 223) Another problem with accessing secondary data is our researchers language skills. All of the research from foreign countries is of course, in the language spoken in the country. Our reseachers would need to be able to read and comprehend the said language in order to effectivly utlize the secondary research. Another issue when it comes to secondary data is the reliability. When utlizing secondary data it is impertaive that several questions are asked in order to validate it. This questions include. The usual who, what , how and why. Who collected the data? What purposes was it collected for? Why was the data collected? How was the data collected? " Checking the consistency of one set of secondary data with other data is known validity is an effective and often used way of judging validity." (cateroa 226) After analyzing the secondary data, we will then turn our efforts into gathering primary data. Because we analyzed the secondary data first, we will know what questions are still left unaswered and we can tailor our research efforts towards those questions and than analyze the primary data accordingly. Although, primary data collection is expensive to obtain, the data will be specifically tailored to our research needs. Therefore ,making the