The Suarez Laboratories' mission is to blend marketing intelligence with marketing research to provide real-world opportunities and advantages to businesses, and to UA students and faculty seeking to perform applied research.

The Laboratories support both business marketing undergraduate and graduate course offerings, as well as student and faculty research activities by providing faculty and students with the research capabilities for conducting studies pertinent to the theory and practice of marketing and business, and creating an experiential learning environment where students and faculty can acquire and hone the skills and competencies needed for conducting theoretical and applied research.

Features

The one-of-a-kind marketing research, teaching and experiential learning facility features three laboratories and a large classroom to provide students and faculty members the tools to convert knowledge into useful intelligence for the business community:

• A Cognitive Research Laboratory (580A) with contemporary psychological and cognitive research techniques, such as eye tracking, and brainwave and physiological analyses, that allows researchers to comprehensively understand the respondents' real time feelings, impressions, and emotions toward marketing messages and products.
• A Marketing Intelligence Laboratory (580B) with eight workstations and two teamwork areas, where students and faculty members can develop comprehensive marketing reports on consumer, competitor, industry, business environment and socio-economic market intelligence. This laboratory also will be available to area businesses to conduct market analysis and product development.
• The Suarez in the Square Classroom (580E), an innovative, dynamically designed class space built in an amphitheater format that can be used for both student instruction and professional training seminars.
• An Experimental Research Laboratory (580F) consisting of 12 networked respondent stations, where students and businesses can use techniques such as facial coding software to test the effectiveness of print advertisements, Web sites, television commercials, video presentations, and then survey/interview the respondents as to their opinions, preferences, and motivations.

In addition to the above four laboratories, the Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories also has a Director’s Office (580C) and a Reception Area (580D) that can be used by students, faculty, respondents, and businesses during the research endeavors. Coupled with the focus group suite and the e-Usability laboratory in the adjoining Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing, students and faculty are provided with a truly comprehensive set of resources to learn and apply marketing research and analytics. It also provides, in one central location, businesses with all the tools needed for advanced applied marketing research, marketing intelligence, and marketing analytics.

Four-Fold Vision

The Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories are a one of a kind suite of experiential marketing research laboratories in the Department of Marketing at The University of Akron dedicated to:

• providing students with an experiential learning environment where they not only learn the latest marketing research techniques, but learn how to convert the findings into actionable intelligence;
• offering an environment where new marketing research and analytics techniques will be developed, tested and verified;
• enabling students and professors, across a broad spectrum of disciplines, to collaborate on and complete a wide range of applied research endeavors; and
• serving the local and national business communities by providing a facility with state-of-the-art tools in which businesses can successfully complete applied marketing research endeavors.

Photographs of the Lab