For this week’s assignment, you are to select two to three topics that you are interested in writing your research paper on. For each topic, provide an idea journal on what you would like to research and why. Be sure to include your audience and the purpose of the topics. Once you have completed an idea journal for each topic, decide on which topic you will continue with and provide reasons why you selected that particular topic.

Introduction

For this assignment I am required to write about two to three ideas, one of which I would carry on throughout this course and would be converted to my final research paper. I am really enthusiastic about this idea as I will surely be doing research in my career for which I would definitely need to research papers. An idea journal acts as a conception point for a research paper (Howard & Taggart, 2013). For this week’s assignment, I searched online for different topics and two ideas that attract me to develop a research paper on are: “ethical issues in marketing to children” and “leadership failures”. In the following discussion I will write the details of why I chose these topics and in the final section of this paper I would write about my selection of one of the topic and would provide the reasons for this selection.

Ethical Issues in Marketing to Children

Marketing is an effective tool to attract consumers to a product or a service. Organizations may spend millions of dollar to market to people of different age groups. Children are also an age group targeted by marketing strategies excessively (Puiu, 2008). I believe that it is the right of any organization to market to children or any other age group. There are many country specific and global laws that govern marketing.

I have observed that sometimes marketers may use strategies to attract children of a certain age that are not within the social norms and standards. There might be no legal issues but this is more of an issue of self-regulation for the marketers in my opinion. In other words, marketers may not be following the highest ethical standards that they should when marketing to children and/or other age group. This is a reason that I am tempted to research different aspects of these ethical issues and write a concise research paper about. This must have some negative impact on the behavior of a child when he/she watches these marketing messages and models them. Marketers may also be using negative marketing where they tell the children the advantages of their product or service only. They never tell what might be the disadvantages of the product or service and what precautions are associated with its use. Parents may not be that much aware of these marketing strategies and would not stop their children from attending these marketing messages. In many cases, parents would submit to the wishes of their children and purchase them products that may not be good for their health and safety. I believe that this could be one of the options that could let me explore my research capabilities and go through a learning process that could help mea learn to do meaningful research in my professional life.

Leadership Failures

Leadership is another topic that I would like to do some research about. The reason that I am tempted to research this topic is because I want to be an effective leader in my professional life. I believe that I have to know more about leadership than I already know about. To understand something better, it is necessary that one learns both the negative and positive factors effecting it.

I searched for different aspects of leadership failures on the internet. There is scientific research available on this topic that could be useful to actually write a research paper on it. I also searched for specific examples of leadership failures and how it has affected organizations. One of the example that came in front of me was the failure of leadership at General Electric. In the case of General Electric, due to the lack of vision by its leadership, it was not able to identify or create new markets for its products (Armstrong, 2010). This resulted in huge losses for the organization.

There were also some more leadership examples like the leadership failure at British Home Stores but I was unable to find the details of the leadership failures that could be directly related to leadership itself.

My Research Topic Choice

For this course and for my final paper that this assignment would lead to, I would really like to write about “Ethical Issues in Marketing to Children”. I would prefer this topic over leadership failures because I believe this topic would let me learn a lot about business and marketing ethics and also about child psychology and how their mind works. I have always been interested in knowing about human behavior. This topic would introduce me to human behavior and how marketer exploit this behavior in their interest. I Googled the topic and was able to get specific results related to this topic. Unfortunately I was not able to find enough resources and specific examples that would help me develop a paper on the topic “Leadership Failure”

I am expecting to use different research tools for this assignment. I think that https://scholar.google.com is one of the useful resource in this regards. The university library’s research journals database would also provide a great help as this research paper progresses. In my research I would use different resources like journals, authentic website references and book references to make it more scientific and based on facts than on opinions.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude my discussion by stressing on the importance of this course and the skills that I am expecting to learn as this course moves on. I would try my best to learn how to do an effective and scientific research and ho to document this research. I hope this will help me in writing research papers in throughout my educational career and beyond.