Question 1

Combined approach
As a marketing manager, I think the combination of qualitative and quantitative research approach will be the best to be applied to this scenario.
Due to the purpose of this research is to address the reason of our company falling in ranking amount world’s best low-cost airliners, therefore, we need to access data and outcomes from previous marketing research and customers’ feedback to understand what we should improve to gain the position we ranked last year and what innovation should be done to push us forward amount many competitors. In addition, this information can help us to design research questions and methods for qualitative approach (in-depth interview) and quantitative approach (questionnaire).

Question 2

The target respondents and how to reach them
The general public will have certain degree of awareness of our company and our products due to the company’s reputation and its performance in the industry. However, conducting a professional market research requires us to involve various groups of people that could address research questions and eventually help us to improve. The group diversity can reinforce the accuracy and efficiency of the research, on the other hand, more reasonable and convincing feedback generated leads to more informative outcomes which will guide us through marketing processes. As Jetstar Airways marketing manager, I think the main target respondents of this research should be our passengers. In terms of this research is conducted to understanding the fall in ranking and planning how to improve in next year, the passengers whom we choose should be passengers that have multiple experiences flying with us, in order to draw comparison regarding previous years and predicting the following years. Passengers should be divided into different categories demographically and geographically. In addition, passengers could be put into different groups by their age, occupation, income and where they come from.
The first group would be new participating passengers. Regardless of which airliner they choose previously, they are meaningful for us to understand and study the initial impression we give to our customers. What is more, new passengers are normally exciting with the fresh experience, which will raise the participation level and create more valuable outcomes in the research process.
The next group would be younger domestic passengers with relative lower income, and most of them are students and leisure tourists. I believe that in relation to their income and personal preferences, low cost airlines are the primary choice when they choose airliners, they will fly with us frequently and they would stay with us if their needs are satisfied. I think they would be happy to be engaged in the research process by filling out questionaries, it is an easy way to address the questions with low cost. It can be done during the flight. However, it may result a high proportion of non-response, it still produce large amount of feedbacks for us to observe, and I believe sometimes non-response is responding with a different attitude.
The following group are business people that frequently travel with us. They choose us because of the high frequency they are flying inbound or outbound Australia. And our major service area is domestic routes within Australia; this provides them multiple choices and convenience for them. This makes them the best respondents for this research, because they have abundant experience with us and can critic on many areas such as the value for money, lounge, seat comfort, staff service, catering and entertaining (SkyTrax 2012). This is a comprehensive and entire data collecting process which can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the research. Moreover, this group of people can be reached by various methods such as onboard questionnaire, telephone, mail or email survey and can be interviewed by staffs.
Another crucial group to this