MKTG396v9 Assignment 1: Annotated Bibliography

Assignment 1 is worth 15% of your overall course grade. You should start working on this assignment after completing Lesson 6. Pay particular attention to the videos available on the Lesson 6 Readings and Key Terms page.

The purpose of this assignment is twofold. First, this assignment will encourage you to think critically about the quality of the sources that you will be including in your second assignment. Second, this assignment will enable you to receive feedback from an Academic Expert regarding the quality of the sources that you have found during your literature review. This will help you to better understand which sources you should include and which sources which sources you should exclude.

As the two course assignments are parts of the same project, you should familiarize yourself with the requirements of Assignment 2 before beginning work on Assignment 1.

Please note that you may be required to resubmit Assignment 1 before moving on to Assignment 2. Pay close attention to the feedback you receive on this assignment, as your success in Assignment 2 is closely linked to the quality of the sources you use.

Getting Started

Your first step will be to select a physical product that would be purchased by a household consumer (not a business). Products that are high-involvement purchases work better for this assignment. (Note: High-involvement purchases use an extended problem-solving purchase process and are covered in Lesson 4.)

The product that you select needs to be a specific brand and model, as in the example below:

Please reach out to your Academic Expert through the Student Support Centre if you are unsure whether the product you have in mind would meet the requirements for this project.

Requirements

Your submission should include the following:

1. Title page: Include the assignment name, course title, your name, and your student I.D.number.

• Content: Include your list of 10 annotations. (See details on annotations below.)
• Reference page: Include a full reference list of your 10 sources, in APA format and sorted alphabetically.

Submit your assignment for grading on the Assignment 1 submission page.

Grading

This assignment will be marked on a pass/resubmit basis, providing you with an opportunity to receive feedback from an Academic Expert. In fact, you are encouraged to seek assistance and may go back and forth a few times before submitting a satisfactory assignment. This is intended as a learning opportunity, so you will not be penalized for requiring additional support.

If your submission meets the requirements, you may proceed to working on Assignment 2.

If your submission does not meet the requirements, your Academic Expert will provide feedback and ask that you revise and resubmit. You will not be able to submit Assignment 2 until you have received a pass on Assignment 1.

Finding Sources

Before beginning your search, you should have completed all the readings and learning activities for Lesson 6 and selected your product for this project.

Your annotated bibliography should include sources of information on demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics of the high-volume consumers of your product. Do not worry about geographic characteristics in your annotated bibliography; you will add these details in Assignment 2.

Do not expect to access only a single database or find a comprehensive consumer profile for a particular product from a simple Internet search. The challenge of this project comes from searching for and evaluating bits and pieces of information that you will fit together to build your consumer profile. More information on evaluating sources for quality is provided below.

Your first stop should be the Athabasca University Library, which offers tutorials, webinars, and other supports to help you find appropriate scholarly sources. You should also conduct a broad web search to discover professional and applied sources of data.

Troubleshooting

When you begin searching for the characteristics of those who are the high-volume buyers for your product, you may find that no data is available or that it is extremely limited.

Sometimes you can find consumer data for a competitor’s brand in the same product category. For example, both the Honda CRV and the Toyota Rav are in the category of compact crossover SUVs. Therefore, if your product is the Honda CRV, you can also use Toyota Rav data. If you do this, make sure to mention that you are generalizing data from one brand to another.

If you continue to have difficulty locating quality sources, you may need to select a new product. This is one of the reasons you should begin working on this assignment as soon as possible!

Source Quality

A high-quality source is one that is founded in research or solid reasoning, rather than an unsubstantiated opinion. Evaluating whether sources are high-quality and appropriate for your project will require considerable critical thinking. If your annotated bibliography has too many low-quality sources, the Academic Expert will ask you to remove these and request they be replaced with better sources.

The following figure can help you infer the accuracy, reliability, and quality of a source.

Figure 0.1. “Eaton’s Hierarchy of Sources for Educational Research Literature Reviews,” by S. E. Eaton, 2018, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

For more on high-quality sources, you are encouraged to read the full article summarized by the figure above:

Eaton, S. E. (2018). Educational research literature reviews: Understanding the hierarchy of sources. University of Calgary. https://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27128.14083

Note: This resource is optional but recommended. It is aimed at educational researchers but is generally relevant for other disciplines, including marketing.

A final consideration when assessing whether a source is relevant to your assignment is how generalizable the information might be. Research that examines beliefs, attitudes, and preferences is often relative to a specific time period and location. For example, a paper that examines the attitudes of teenagers in Egypt may not be generalizable to teenagers in Canada. Likewise, opinion research that was conducted 15 years ago may not be generalizable to the current context.

Annotations

The word “annotate” means to make a note. When you read a textbook and make a note in the margin about something you just read, you are making an annotation.

An annotated bibliography is a formal and structured set of notes about each book, article, or document included in a bibliography. In this case, the annotated bibliography that you will be developing will be for the 10 high-quality sources on demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics of the high-volume consumers of your product.

You are encouraged to practise writing annotations for each source you evaluate, even if you don’t end up including them all in your assignment submission.

Below is an example of an annotation. Note the following characteristics:

• The source is numbered. This will help you and your Academic Expert easily assess whether you have the required number of sources (10). Your sources should be presented in alphabetical order (last name of the first author).
• The full reference is provided in correct APA format. See the AU Library’s Guide to Citation Style for guidance. You should also familiarize yourself with the guidelines for in-text citations (not included in the example below).
• The annotation includes a concise summary as well as some brief analysis of the source’s strengths and weaknesses. You may also wish to comment on the relevance of the source for your product and project.

Sample Annotation

Source 1

Swaffield, J. B., & Guo, Q. (2020). Environmental stress effects on appetite: Changing desire for high- and low-energy foods depends on the nature of the perceived threat. Evolution, Mind and Behaviour, 18(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1556/2050.2018.00008

In this article, the researchers report on a study where they examined the effect of different types of environmental stressors on appetite and food preference.

They showed that exposure to cues of low social support and high physical threat reduce the desire to eat, whereas cues of economic harshness had little effect. Further analysis revealed a significant interaction between energy level of different foods and perceived threat to physical safety. These findings provide insights on how environmental conditions influence changes in appetite and desire for different kinds of food items.

Two strengths of this article are that it is based on experimental research and it is peer reviewed. A weakness of this paper is the researchers only tested desire and food preference. They did not test actual eating behaviour.

Reference List

The final component of Assignment 1 is the reference list, which should follow APA formatting guidelines. This is simply a repetition of the references used within your annotated bibliography; you will use or build on this list for Assignment 2.