Project/Dissertation Guidelines 1.

Introduction (Chapter 1) - Explain why the central idea behind your project/dissertation is important to the marketing discipline and to the practice of marketing. Your main focus here is to explain how your work helps improve our understanding of the particular marketing field you are interested in. - What is the objective of your project? State this clearly, ideally one, two or three. -Explain how your work will be beneficial to future researchers and how it can improve managerial practice of marketing. 2. Literature review (Chapter 2) -Define your variables by drawing on several definitions from the existing literature. Look at where there are differences and similarities in definitions. Draw conclusions from those definitions and indicate the focus of your work. -Explain the contexts within which variables have been defined and studied. Explain how these contexts do help your work? -Discuss the key relationships that have been studied involving your variables. What kinds of results/findings have been reported in the literature? Have divergent findings been reported? Are there some similarities in the results reported? -Draw specific research hypotheses from the literature review undertaken. Note that the research hypotheses you draw should help to achieve your research objectives. 3. Methodology (Chapter 3) -Explain your choice of approaches to data collection: qualitative, quantitative or both? -What is the source of your sample (i.e. what is your sampling frame?) -Who are included in your sample? What are the criteria you are using for including and excluding respondents in your sample? -How are you going to collect data from your sample? Face to face interviews, postal survey, emails? You need to make a choice and justify why you choose a particular data collection method. -How are you going to analyse the data collected? Explain your analytical approaches, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. -Undertake the analysis of the data and explain the procedure you followed. 4. Findings (Chapter 4) -Report findings from your study by using tables and charts. Be objective when reporting the results by avoiding including your own opinion. Report exactly what you get.

-Discuss the findings by highlighting what the implications of the results are for researchers and for managers. Here you can include your interpretation of the results, which again must be objective. 5. Conclusion, Limitations and Direction for Future Research (Chapter 5) -Briefly state your key conclusions from the study results by highlighting the extent to which your objectives (and of course your hypotheses) have been achieved. -Explain any limitation that readers must take note of when interpreting the results of your study. -Explain how future research can improve on your study. 6. References Use Harvard referencing style 7. Appendices