Write a two-page paper describing a basic experimental design for the proposal.
Design a basic experiment to assess a cause and effect relationship based on your research question. Include the following information:
1. Research the objective.
2. Explain if the design is a true experiment or a quasi-experiment. Justify your selection.
3. Develop a hypothesis based on your research question.
4. Evaluate your hypothesis according to the characteristics provided in the lecture. Be specific.
5. Describe the independent variables, blocking variables, dependent variables, and extraneous variables.
6. Explain how you plan to deal with issues related to internal and external validity. Be specific.
7. Conclusion: Highlight the major points discussed in the previous sections. Be sure to relate the information back to the purpose and relevance of the research.
Research Topic:
Apple Inc. and Samsung is without a doubt the kingpins in the smartphone pack. They have battled it out for the top most position in all aspect ranging from some sales through the market shares to the payment of royalties to direct rivals. Despite taking position two in the last quarter in 2014, Samsung had more deliveries with its supplies not enough for the demanding customers. This prompted the sale of the older class of Galaxy phones by reducing their prices a strategy Apple Inc. would not afford due to the high cost of production. This prompted Apple into having a smaller shareholding in the following quarter.
Despite the privilege of being a big market player in her section, Apple has experienced quite a turbulent run in the recent past due to the stiff competition and conflict with her strongest rivals- Samsung. In the previous financial quarter, Samsung had a larger market share compared to Apple's and other companies (Andre et al., 2004). Apple Inc. attained a 14.1 percent market share in the worldwide smartphone market compared to Samsung's share of about 21.7 percent (IDC, 2015). In the first financial quarter, a year before Samsung had a lion's share of the worldwide market with 24.8 percent market share whereas Apple had 11.7 percent shares in the international market for smartphones. This is also reflected in the deliveries the companies made the sales(Andre et al., 2004). Samsung during the second quarter in 2015 made 73.2 million deliveries items compared with Apple's 47.5 million deliveries over the same period. Before Samsung led, Apple had the lead in the last quarter of 2014. However, Apple's lead was for a while back since Samsung jumped back to the lead due to its strong portfolio it had built to sustain it in superb performance despite the difficult situations and stiff competition(Boudreau et al., 2012).
In 2012, Apple Inc. had been voted as the number one overall in marketing excellence, not only then, but also four other times before. This is attributed to their three point marketing strategy empathy, focus and impute. Empathy emphasizes that the company has to understand the customer's needs that any other since he's their customer. Focus removes all the unnecessary opportunities and goes for that which must be done. How we present good product determines whether they reach while good. This has helped the company to build a rapport with their customers and sustained the customer base. Apple Inc. has also established and kept a reputation as they can easily use their well-formed structures to make their products reach the world within short time possible (Gawer et al., 2012).
However, with such comprehensive marketing strategies, Apple Inc. has not managed to influence other high standard processor manufacturing company apart from Samsung. This has given Samsung and other smartphone companies that manufacture their processors. Since Samsung also produce smartphones and the processors of which it supplies some to Apple Inc. Since the two companies are competitors, Samsung has got an added advantage since they are bound to make decisions that favor themselves.
This might be Apple's reason for the decline from being top in their market share of Apple.