Unit 10, P1, P2-
In this essay I am going to describe the different types of market research, then I will then go on to explain how the different methods are used to make a marketing decision. Market research is the action or activity of gathering information about consumers’ needs and preferences. There are four main types of market research which are primary research, secondary research, qualitative research and quantitative research.
Primary research gathers original information directly for your purpose this includes, surveys, focus groups and questionnaires. Secondary research gathers existing information through available sources such as, information on the internet, existing market research results and newspaper articles.
Quantitative and qualitative research defines the type of information you gather. Quantitative research gathers numerical data, it includes sales figure and financial trends and qualitative research gathers views and attitudes, this includes focus groups with customers and potential customers to understand their feelings and attitudes towards your products and services.
All of these methods are useful when making marketing decisions. You can use quantitative research as an approach to identify the size of your market, it can also help you to understand the demographics of customers, such as their age and gender, The statistics that quantitative research produce is useful as it can give you an overview of your market.
Qualitative research allows you to get a better understanding of your customers’ needs and interests, which allows you to improve customer service and identify growing sales.
Primary research is valuable as it helps when they want to find out whether the public like their product/service, for example questionnaires can be personalised for the product or service, which will allow them to get an immediate and honest response.
Lastly secondary research can be used a reference, for example when a company wants to find out about a how well a similar product/service may have sold in the market. This data will inform organisations from beforehand whether or not their product/service may sell in the market
P3-
In this part of the assignment I will be planning market research for Sweet tooth. I will be explaining all the different market research methods Sweet tooth should use.
The first type of market research I conducted for Sweet tooth is primary research. Using this research would allow Sweet tooth to find out if the public would be interested in buying the product, this could be done by using questionnaires which is an efficient way of getting quick responses and with these results Sweet tooth will be able to identify their customers needs and adjust their product to suit their customers.
Another type of research is secondary research. This research is useful for sweet tooth to carry out as it allows them to compare their similar products that other competitors are selling, this would give them an insight on who their competing with and also how well the product sells in the market. using this type of research can also allow sweet tooth to differentiate their product from their competitors, as they will found out important information such as, price, target market and the design of the product. They could conduct market research through using internet, newspapers and articles.
The last type of market research is qualitative and quantitative research. qualitative research will provide sweet tooth with an in-depth understanding of the opinions from the public, they can conduct this research by gathering surveys. Quantitative research is useful for Sweet tooth as it allows them to get statistical data; this could be on old company's reports, for example sweet tooth can research old or existing company’s reports and get an insight on the amount of sales that could be potentially made when selling deserts.
P4-
Sweet Tooth is patisserie that offers delightful, scrumptious sweet treats that will tingle your taste buds. This questionnaire will help our company narrow down customer’s favourite flavours of our new range of milkshakes.
o
Under 16
o
17-25
o
25-30
o
40 and over
2) What is your gender?
o
Male
o
Female
3) Have you had milkshake before?
o
Yes
o
No
4) Which would be your preferred milkshake add in
o
Oreo
o
Ferrero Rochea
o
Skittles
o
M & M
o
Snickers
o
Starburst
5) Which special options would you like to see available?
o
Soy
o
Sugar free
o
Reduced fat
o
Protein boost
o
Organic
o
Reduced calorie
6) If you were to buy a milkshake which of the following
would you be most likely to purchase it with?
o
Cookie
o
Muffin
o
Cupcake
o
Crisps
o
sweets
Unit 10 P5/M3
In this assignment I will be interpreting the findings from my primary
and secondary market research. I will explain
why I carried out this research and what it consisted of doing. I will be
analysing the findings from my primary and secondary market research. I will
analyse this data by presenting the findings of my market research and will go
on to explain how I could have improved when carrying out this research
For our primary market research, my team and I needed
to find out what different flavours the students liked, what ingredients they
would like their milkshake to be made with and what extra deserts they would
purchase with their milkshake. In total we managed to hand out 30
questionnaires and received them shortly after. They all gave us clear and
direct responses. However we may have experienced people lying on the questionnaire
or not paying an interest as we only sold under 10 milkshakes
My team and I also gathered some secondary market
research. This is because we had to get an idea on how to price our product. We
conducted this research by researching similar companies such as “shake away”. From
this research we came up with the strategy of pricing our milkshakes at a lower
price reason being we saw that “shake away” prices were a lot higher as they
are an established business however we should have followed their strategy of
pricing our milkshakes a little bit higher as we may have made more of a
profit.
To make this research more affective, my team and I
could have asked more questions so that we could get into depth of what our
customers really wanted such as how much would you be willing to spend on a
milkshake? With these results we could have priced the milkshakes as what was
most comment and maybe we would have sold more. The pricing of the product that
my team and I decided to settle on also did not work well when trying to sell
our products. I think this was because the price was low people were not sure if
it was a quality product so they may have not wanted waste their money
To improve on our secondary research, we thought that
we wouldn’t price our milkshakes the same as “shake away” as we were thinking
that we were a new start up business so the public would not want to buy a
higher priced product from us if we are not established. My team and I could have also research the
prices of some new start up business that also sale milkshakes and deserts.
Making our prices higher, similar to “shake away “could have allowed us to increase
our profit when selling our milkshakes.
Unit 10 M1-Primary research is more suitable to situations when an organisation wants to find out whether the public like their product or service. This is because they can provide organisations with a first had response to specific questions about their goods. For example, questionnaires will allow their target market to answer questions that will give companies an immediate response that is specially personalised to their product or services.
Secondary is best suited to situations where organisations for example wanted to find out information from 3 years ago about a similar product they would use secondary research, this information will be easier to get a hold of and will give an organisation on outline on how their similar product/service will do on the market. Secondary research can also help out in situations where companies wish to compare their sales rates to rival organisations. For example in the case of Sweet tooth we could research other similar business such as the desert shop called "shake away" and compare their financial reports to theirs for a specific year. This information would tell Sweet tooth if they are reaching their goals each year by researching how well they are doing compared to similar rival organisations.
Qualitative market research is suited to situations when an organisation wants to receive, in depth criticism on their products or services. Organisations may arrange things such as focus groups and open questionnaires. These different forms of qualitative market research will provide organisations with detailed information on many aspects of their product or service so that they know how to alter them to reach consumer needs.
In this part of the assignment I will evaluate the market research method used by Sweet tooth.
Sweet tooth used primary, secondary, quantitative and qualitative research
The first kind of market research we carried out as a team was primary market research. We carried out this research by creating a questionnaire which we gave out to the students and teachers who were our target market. The advantage of using primary research was that we were able to get back an immediate response of exactly what our customers wanted such as there was a question that was asked;
"If you were to buy a milkshake which of the following would you be most likely to purchase it with?" with this feedback we found that the most common response was cupcakes so we decides to sell them alongside the milkshakes. Having this knowledge meant that we were able to avoid wasting money on the other snacks that people would have not wanted. the disadvantage of using primary research is that people may have not taken our questionnaire seriously, the environment where we handed out the questionnaire which was college and it s very so people may not have had the full concentration focused on the questionnaire.
Overall I think that primary research had some good aspects such as with our detailed and direct questions we were able to get a direct response which was understandable, however I think for primary research to be successful a lot of questionnaires need to be handed out to maintain a broader response, which is what we failed to do. To improve I would make sure that more questionnaires were handed out.
Sweet tooth also used secondary research. We did this by researching other similar business such as "shake away". The advantage of using secondary research was that it was efficient as it did not take up all of our time, also we was able to get background information on how milkshakes sell in the market. We managed to determine our pricing strategy though looking at the pricing of strategy but we decided not to follow them and we priced our milkshakes for a lower price as we had the mentality the lower the price the more we will sell. The disadvantage of using secondary research is that some of the research maybe misleading or fake. Some of the research we found was not relevant to us which caused us to make some wrong decisions.
Overall I think secondary research showed some good aspects, but it was my team and I poor decision making, such as we decided to make our prices lower than "shake away" milkshakes but this didn't work out for us as we spent money on ingredients and priced our products low which meant that we was not able to make much of a profit. I think secondary research is good as this shows that if we followed a current business we may have made more of a profit.
Sweet tooth was not being able to sell many of our products successfully. My team and I decided to carry out some qualitative market research, to try and find out why only a small amount of people were buying the milkshakes. We decided to have interviews with people around college, this helped us to understand why customers were not purchasing our product and what we were doing wrong so that we could make some changes to our milkshakes. However, there was also a chance of people lying as well. If some of participants lied during the interview, we would failed to be able to change our product, leading to little sales and a loss in the business overall.
In this assignment I have evaluated the research that my and I have used for our service.
Unit 10 M2/D2
In this section of the assignment I will be talking
about why I chose the particular method of data collection for Sweet tooth. I
will also be explaining how we carried out this research and evaluating the
findings we got from the research.
When carrying out primary market research, my team and
I decided to do this in the form of questionnaires. We handed out 15 questionnaires which
contained 6 questions. The results of the primary market research provided us
with direct and detailed information from our target market that we needed in
order to make the milkshakes how they wanted them. We managed to get all of
these questionnaires filled out, and with each of them we were able to find out
the information we wanted. This was very
helpful for my team and I reason being we was able to make the milkshakes to
how our customers wanted which we knew would boost customer satisfaction levels.
However, there was a chance that people could have lied when doing our
questionnaires as we made the milkshakes to what people wanted but we did not
seem to sell as much milkshakes as we thought we would. We noticed this when we were selling our product
and we failed to make over 8 sales. We decided that we would use secondary market research to figure out how to price our product a. We did this by researching similar company’s such a “shake away”, we realised that their prices were a little bit higher than we intended to do for our own, but it was untestable for them as they are already a successful and established business. So we thought the lower the price the more people would want to buy, but this did not work out for us as we spent money on ingredients and we also priced our milkshakes low which lead to us not being able to make much of a profit, The research we undertook was good but we did not follow “shake away” pricing strategy like we should have.
By carrying out qualitative market research such as interviewing people one to one my team and I were able to get as much of a personal response from our target market as possible. This gave us the information we needed to make our milkshakes, as it would include all of the aspects that our target market wanted.
In my opinion, I feel that secondary research would have been best suited for Sweet tooth if we followed the pricing strategy I think we would have made more of a profit. The Sweet tooth milkshakes our unique milkshakes that our handmade. This meant that my team and I needed as much information we could get. This information would help our product stand out above other on the market and capture our target audience.
