Final answer:
Marketing managers use a representative sample to gather data that reflects the characteristics of the entire population they are studying, which provides insights that are generalizable to the whole group.
Step-by-step explanation:
Since it is rarely possible for marketing managers to acquire information about every member of a population, they instead acquire information from a representative Sample. When conducting research, marketers often use a representative sample, which is a subset of the population that has the same characteristics as the entire group. In the provided scenarios, such as the electronics chain store surveying customers or the librarian tracking book checkouts, the common strategy is to collect data from a smaller group that can be analyzed to infer conclusions about the whole population. The success of these studies depends on how well the representative sample mirrors the total population. This ensures that the findings are generalizable and that the sampling error is minimized.