Guides · Research ideas and questions

Research question examples for marketing and business

A strong research question names a specific relationship, the setting it applies to, and a reason the answer is not already known. The examples below rewrite broad marketing topics into researchable questions, starting from open questions in published research agendas, and state the principle behind each rewrite.

What makes a research question researchable

A research question fixes everything that follows: what you measure, which data you need and what would count as an answer. Whetten's editorial on theoretical contribution names the building blocks a question should touch: which factors matter (what), how they are related (how), the reasoning that links them (why), and the people, places and times to which the answer applies (who, where, when).^[1]

Editors complain most about questions too broad to fail. The editor of the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing describes submissions that open with a general question about which factors drive some outcome, answer it with whatever the survey data show, and end with correlations everyone expected. In his view, which is an editor's judgement rather than a measured finding, such papers are rejected because they add nothing beyond common sense.^[2]

From topic to question in four steps

The steps below move from a problem to a bounded question. Each rests on advice from editors and review authors.^[3][4]

• Start from a problem someone needs solved. Reibstein, Day and Wind argue that research should begin with an important marketing problem rather than with a method or dataset in search of an application.^[3]
• Find what reviews say is unresolved. Review articles exist partly to identify inconsistent results, existing gaps and future directions, so a recent review's agenda is the quickest map of open questions.^[4]
• Name the relationship and the reason for it. A question that says which variable affects which, and why, can be answered; a list of factors cannot. Sutton and Staw point out that lists of variables and hypotheses are not theory on their own.^[5][1]
• Set the boundary and justify it. State who, where and when the answer applies, and why that setting might change it. A former editor of the Journal of Marketing warns that questions confined to one industry in one market are desk rejected for lack of generalizability.^[1][6]

Weak versus strong research question examples

Each pair below starts from an open question in a published review or research agenda. The weak version names a topic; the strong version names a comparison, a setting and a reason the answer is uncertain. The strong versions are illustrations written for this guide, not questions copied from the sources.^[7][2]

• Digital marketing. Weak: How do consumers use mobile devices when shopping? Strong: Are product reviews written on smartphones more extreme than reviews of the same products written on desktop computers, and does the difference vary across product categories? Kannan and Li's research agenda raises this possibility, which gives the question a direction to test.^[7]
• B2B platforms. Weak: What makes B2B digital platforms successful? Strong: How does the relationship between a platform provider and its business clients affect platform success when both sides of the relationship are observed? A review of 37 studies found that very few examined the provider and the client together.^[8]
• Segmentation. Weak: Why is segmentation important in B2B markets? Strong: Do segments defined by cross-functional teams differ from those defined by marketing alone, and which perform better? The comparison comes from the agenda of a systematic review of 88 papers on B2B market segmentation.^[9]
• Sales and marketing. Weak: How can sales and marketing work together better? Strong: Do the practices that align sales and marketing in manufacturers also work in service firms? In a review of more than 25 years of this literature, 87.7% of articles studied manufacturers or mixed samples, and only one focused solely on service providers.^[10]
• Advertising. Weak: Does TV advertising work in a country where it has not been studied? Strong: Does the sales response to TV advertising depend on how fragmented a market's media are, and does that explain why results fail to transfer between countries? Wind and Sharp report that most advertising generalizations do not state their conditions, naming media type and country among the missing ones, whereas a first study in a new country is not a contribution unless the setting changes the answer.^[11][12]

Research question examples by type of study

The form of a question should match what the study can show. These five types cover most marketing and business research.^[1][13]

• Descriptive regularity: to what extent does a known pattern hold in a new domain? Wilson and colleagues asked whether the negative binomial distribution of purchase frequency also describes how often people engage in physical activity, and it did across three countries.^[14]
• Explanatory: why and when does one factor affect another? Kohli and Jaworski derived questions of this kind about market orientation from the literature and 62 field interviews with managers, including when a market orientation matters more or less for performance.^[15]
• Conditional: under which market conditions does a strategy pay off? The B2B segmentation agenda asks, for instance, how a booming versus a declining economy changes marketing strategy performance.^[9]
• Managerial design: what should a firm do? Lilien lists questions such as which customers to involve in B2B innovation and how to measure the value of their involvement.^[16]
• Empirics-first: what explains a pattern observed in data? Golder and colleagues argue that research can start from a real-world observation and produce valid insight without first testing a theory, provided it is not later dressed up as hypothesis testing.^[13]

Common mistakes in research questions

The mistakes below recur in editors' descriptions of rejected submissions. They come from editorials and a systematic review, so they reflect experienced judgement rather than measured rejection rates.^[12][6][17]

• Asking what everyone already knows. Questions whose answer is common sense, such as whether satisfied customers are more loyal, invite rejection for lack of contribution.^[12][2]
• Packing a grand model into one question. Long chains of antecedents, mediators and outcomes produce many hypotheses with little theory behind each one.^[12]
• Relying on context alone. A first study in a new country or industry is not a gap unless the setting gives a reason to expect a different answer.^[12][1]
• Choosing the question because the data or method was available. This reverses the order Reibstein, Day and Wind recommend and tends to yield answers of little use to decision makers.^[3]
• Borrowing a framework that does not fit. A review of B2B branding research found many studies defaulting to consumer branding frameworks instead of theory suited to business markets.^[17]

Test the question before you commit

Write the question as one sentence, then state which answer would surprise you and who would act differently because of it. MacInnis argues that ideas are interesting when they challenge assumptions readers hold, and Corley and Gioia argue that the most useful theory speaks to problems practice actually faces. If you can name neither the surprise nor the user, go back to the review agendas and look again.^[18][19]

The evidence behind this

• Empirical generalizations in marketing: what the research shows
• Marketing knowledge: how it is made and when to trust it

References

1. David A. Whetten (1989). What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 490–495.
2. Cheng Lu Wang (2025). Editorial: Demonstrating contributions through storytelling. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.
3. David J. Reibstein, George Day, Jerry Wind (2009). Guest Editorial: Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way?. Journal of Marketing.
4. Robert W. Palmatier, Mark B. Houston, John Hulland (2018). Review articles: purpose, process, and structure. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46(1), 1–5.
5. Robert I. Sutton, Barry M. Staw (1995). What Theory is Not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(3), 371–384.
6. V. Kumar (2016). My Reflections on Publishing in Journal of Marketing. Journal of Marketing.
7. P.K. Kannan, H. Alice Li (2016). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing.
8. Deep Shree, Rajesh Kumar Singh, Justin Paul, Andy Wei Hao, Shichun Xu (2021). Digital platforms for business-to-business markets: A systematic review and future research agenda. Journal of Business Research.
9. Roberto Mora Cortez, Ann Højbjerg Clarke, Per Vagn Freytag (2021). B2B market segmentation: A systematic review and research agenda. Journal of Business Research.
10. Wim G. Biemans, Avinash Malshe, Jeff S. Johnson (2022). The sales-marketing interface: A systematic literature review and directions for future research. Industrial Marketing Management.
11. Yoram Wind, Byron Sharp (2009). Advertising Empirical Generalizations: Implications for Research and Action. Journal of Advertising Research.
12. Cheng Lu Wang (2022). Editorial – The misassumptions about contributions. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 16(1), 1–2.
13. Peter N. Golder, Marnik G. Dekimpe, Jake T. An, Harald J. van Heerde, Darren S. U. Kim, Joseph W. Alba (2022). Learning from Data: An Empirics-First Approach to Relevant Knowledge Generation. Journal of Marketing.
14. Amy L. Wilson, Byron Sharp, Cathy Nguyen, Svetlana Bogomolova (2017). Expanding Marketing Empirical Generalisations to Health Behaviours: Physical Activity Is Not So Different From Buying Behaviour, After-All. Australasian Marketing Journal.
15. Ajay K. Kohli, Bernard J. Jaworski (1990). Market Orientation: The Construct, Research Propositions, and Managerial Implications. Journal of Marketing.
16. Gary L. Lilien (2016). The B2B Knowledge Gap. International Journal of Research in Marketing.
17. Christian Kowalkowski, Joona Keränen, Edwin J. Nijssen (2026). How B2B branding research measures up: A systematic review of key themes, theories, and methods. Industrial Marketing Management.
18. Deborah J. MacInnis (2011). A Framework for Conceptual Contributions in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136–154.
19. Kevin G. Corley, Dennis A. Gioia (2011). Building Theory about Theory Building: What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?. Academy of Management Review, 36(1), 12–32.

Bibliographic details only. Follow the DOI to read each study at its publisher.