For me, I think I learned more about gathering market research and the challenges to it. I am more of the type of person who enjoys doing the market analysis part, but I never realized how difficult it can be to get the data. It all starts off with asking the right questions and what method you use. Obviously, the survey, interviews, and focus groups are the more common methods. However, I noticed that a lot of people had picture surveys or photo collages that I thought were very creative and informative for their research. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words. However, a lot of people mentioned in their presentations that they learned to ask for captions from their pictures or explanations as to why those people chose that picture to answer the question. I guess, we need to ask what the “thousand words” are that go behind the picture, instead of trying to interpret the meaning behind them.
Along with choosing the appropriate method for your research, I found out that actually obtaining the data is really difficult. Depending on your target market, some people are just hard to get a hold of. Also, people in general don’t like to give of their time for a market research project unless there is some immediate reward for them. Since we don’t have any funds for this, it was a challenge to find people in your segment that would talk to us. In our project, we were looking for stay-at-home dads (SAHD). Some SAHDs aren’t necessarily proud about it and aren’t going to willingly volunteer their information, much less time to be interviewed. In order to interview some SAHDs, I went to Central Market’s play area on a Friday afternoon when I thought SAHDs would be taking their children. I had to watch their behavior and kids to assume if they were or weren’t SAHDs. A few of the fathers who I thought were SAHDs had very young children (in their toddler years) that were too busy to be interviewed at the time, because they had to keep a watchful eye on their children. When I did approach the fathers, I found it a little bit weird to be “Hey I’m doing a research project, and I was wondering if you were a stay-at-home dad.” However, if I didn’t ask, we would just be assuming that they fit within our segment. Overall, I found out from this project that gathering the market research data can be really difficult, and that doesn’t even include the analysis part.
Another concept I learned was the complexities of segmentation. I thought it was a simple group of people, but I found out that you can get very specific, especially with their behaviors and actions. When you think about it, there are many different ways to separate people. You can use age, location, marital status, and all of their behaviors. By getting your purchasing patterns, you can start to see that there are certain demographics that are clumped together by the way they make purchasing decision. You can work the other way too like in our project and choose a segment that you want to make and market a product to. I think that this is crucial when a particular segment is a growing trend, such as the stay-at-home dads or cougars.
From our project, I realized that even though we chose the SAHD segment, it could be split up even further to those who had older children that went to school and those who had younger infants and toddlers. This makes a huge difference in the product that we make because it affects the SAHDs behavior as to whether he finds his own things to do while his kids are in school or whether he take the kids out during the day to do activities. Another factor of the SAHD segment that we did not foresee was that some of them are more open about being a SAHD than others. It usually correlated with their age. Those that were older and had older kids were not as open to talk about their life to us unless we were a close acquaintance or relative. The younger SAHDs seemed to have the growing trend with them, and it is more widely accepted now.
I felt very comfortable with this project because it was consistent and did not go at an overwhelmingly fast speed at a certain time during the semester which is often the case in other classes. I feel as if everything was planned very well. I believe our team has worked well together although we are very different people. We usually split up the work evenly and went from there. We did not usually have too many questions until the very end of the project when we needed to get your feedback on our product ideas.
The process of the project went well if we did not know that we would be producing a product later in the semester. As one group said earlier, they already had an idea of their product before they conducted their research, so they were already biased as to what they wanted to hear from their data. I feel like our group was not aware of the product project (or it was in the very back of our minds) to where we were really looking at our data before we threw out product ideas.
In terms of working in a group, I feel like we needed more time in class to work on the final project, perhaps have a project work day because the teams were so large and it was hard for everyone in our group to get together at the same time. I also think that more learning would be facilitated if each person had more responsibilities and the group was forced to discuss the project more often. Smaller 3 people groups would allow everyone to have more of a say, as well as more time to interact with each other and discuss their ideas and learnings. I might feel this way because I am slower to speak than most others, and I do not get the chance to voice my opinions especially in a short amount of time with a large group of members (perhaps they were just more outspoken as well). Overall, I feel like the group experience was necessary for this project, but I don’t think that this group particularly helped or hindered my learning or enjoyment of the course material.
