Dissertation (30 pages)
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DissertationOutline.docxDissertation Outline
1. Title:
A Study of How Advertising Affect Consumers’ Purchase Decision towards Fast Food Industries in Hong Kong
2. Background and Overall Research Aim:
· Background of the area to be investigated
The industry studied in this dissertation would be focusing on the fast food industry and how advertising would affect consumers’ purchase decision on purchasing fast food in Hong Kong.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, fast food stands for the food which is easily prepared and processed, is served in snack bars and restaurants as a quick meal or to be taken away (Oxford Dictionaries, 2017). Besides, fast food restaurants are known as quick service restaurants which consumers order their food and pay before having their food in most cases and fast food industry are included both Chinese fast food and Western fast food where fast food is not just dominated by hamburger, sandwich or french fries (Youfa, Liang, Hong & WEidong, 2016).
In these past serval decades, United Stated food consumption patterns had arisen and this huge change has transformed the consumption pattern towards dinning worldwide (Mark, James & James, 2001). Most of the early studies had proofed that the arising of fast food industry and change of consumption patterns on meals is due to the importance of household time and the rising value of convenience. These phenomenon can be explained by the cost of time which working hours and female labor force has increased along with people increasing working income and several demographic factors, thus, leading value of convenience to become one of the most important factors on determining food consumption patterns worldwide (Mark, James & James, 2001).
In addition, there were 15.760 restaurants in Hong Kong’s catering market in 2011 which 11.8% were fast food restaurants according to the GAIN Report (Chris, Annie & Caroline, 2016). Competition among variety of fast food chains in Hong Kong is competitive and intense to maintain its customer loyalty and rise its brand awareness and recognition. For instance, worldwide fast food brand, McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, are much recognized than local brand in Hong Kong such as Café De Coral, Maxim’s and Fairfood. Thus, for purpose of remain high brand awareness and recognition and maintain customer loyalty, fast food brand have to update its outlet and food options (Chris, Annie & Caroline, 2016). For instance, McDonald’s had developed McCafe within its shop area, improving its service and food experience towards customers and several food options such as its “Signature” series.
Apart from background of fast food industry in Hong Kong, major variable, advertising affect the intention of customer why choosing fast food for their meal and what kind of food they will have. Basically, this major variable determines consumers’ purchase decision towards fast food industry in Hong Kong. Therefore, this study will focus on how advertising would affect consumer’s purchase decision under Hong Kong fast food industries.
· Importance of the research
There are narrow researches about consumer purchasing decision towards fast food industries in Hong Kong. Therefore, this research is capable to help marketer, advertiser and fast food industries to analysis how advertising would encourage consumers’ purchase decision towards fast food while fast food would related to unhealthy in Hong Kong. Besides, this research would help fast food industries to enhance its brand awareness and recognition, customer loyalty, brand value, etc. while they decided to produce advertising. This research would give efficient referential value for fast food industries to realize how consumer make their decision on meal and how advertising would affect consumer’s intention towards making decision on dinning.
· Overall aim
This research is aimed at finding the insight of consumption pattern towards dinning and the intention of consumer towards having meals and how advertising would encourage, discourage or no effect on consumer purchasing decision towards fast food in Hong Kong. In addition, to evaluate which strategy inside advertising would encourage consumer’s purchase decision more and which would be less and study consumer purchase decision’s intention towards fast food nowadays in Hong Kong as well.
3. Research Objective
· Theoretical model
This theoretical model is explaining how advertising will affect consumer’s purchase decision under Hong Kong fast food industries while advertising contain several strategies or techniques. Besides, some strategies inside advertising may affect consumer’s purchase decision more and some may affect less towards fast food industries in Hong Kong.
· Data collection in field work
Date:
The date of conducting survey will assume to be the first of September to the end of September.
Time:
Since online survey will be apply, there is no time limitation on conducting survey and collecting data. Therefore, the time will be every time during the whole September.
Place:
While data will be collected through online survey, place is not a variable to concern about as well which interviewee can finish the questionnaire by themselves with just a smartphone as well.
4. Initial review of relevant literature
· Definition of major variables
Consumer purchase decision:
Consumer purchase decision is a model from consumer behavior which explaining how consumer make consumption towards a product or service. Basically, consumer purchase decision can be explained by few steps, first of all, need a goods or service would be aware and consumer want to have it. Secondly, consumer would find information towards what they want and need. Afterwards, consumer would evaluate goods or service from different brand and make decision. Lastly, consumer would purchase the goods or service and contain post-purchase behavior (Sahar, 2013).
Advertising:
Advertising is basically a paid, kind of communication from a brand towards mass on specific tools which designed to convince and persuade audience to take actions immediately or in the future (Gulnara, 2014).
Affective message strategy:
Affective message strategies is a common strategy commonly using in advertising that invoke feelings or emotions and matching these feelings or emotions with the products, service and even the brand itself. For instance, advertisement with affective message strategies would enhance the likability of the product, service or brand, reinforce the recognition in audience mind. Besides, emotion would be able to persuade consumer that the product would offer specific emotion while consumer have it such as love. These affective message strategies would lead the consumer to call for action, purchase the product preferably and affect consumers’ reasoning process subsequently (Kenneth & Donald, 2007).
Conative message strategy:
Conative message strategies are designed to generate consumers’ response directly which most of the advertisements with conative message strategies would call consumer for an action after consumer receive the message of it. Theses advertisement are used to support extra promotional efforts. For instance, an advertisement promotion a price reduction in specific time would encourage customer to purchase in that period of time immediately (Kenneth & Donald, 2007).
Cognitive message strategy:
Cognitive message strategy is an presentation of rational information to consumers which the advertisement’s main message is deliver to consumer about how its products or services attributes or how much benefits consumer will receive from the products or service when a cognitive message strategy is used in within an advertisement (Kenneth & Donald, 2007).
· Relation between Advertising and Consumer Purchase Decision
Advertising will help consumer make purchase decision
While consumer is going to make purchase decision and non-purchase decision, consumer is incurred a risk automatically and consciously and the size of risk is depends on hoe importance of the purchase. Therefore, the quantity of relevant information about the goods category and the competing brands would enable consumer making their purchase decision which consumer is seeking the greatest satisfaction from the goods or the brand (Kumar & Raju, 2013).
According to above paragraph, information from advertisement would help consumer analysis which products or brand would provide the greatest satisfaction to them. Thus, advertising would affect consumer to make purchase decision on each consumption.
Hypothesis 1:
Advertisement is affecting consumer’s purchase decision positively
Affective message strategies with emotional appeals will encourage consumer make purchase decision
Consumer behavior is an attitude towards products or service which consumer purchase a goods or service, consumer’s attitude is shaped and the attitude remained the same after consumer purchase the goods or service (Hafiz, MUdasar, Nabil, Waism & Sara, 2014). Therefore, affective message strategies with emotional appeals would encourage consumer make purchase decision,
Thus, assumed that affective message strategy with emotional appeal would encourage consumer purchase decision.
Hypothesis 2:
Affective message strategy with emotional appeals will affect consumer purchase decision positively.
Cognitive message strategy has no affect towards consumer purchase decision in Hong Kong fast food industries
Advertisement which applied cognitive engagement is associated with logical, problem solved condition which information based advertisement would be best for high-involvement customers (Christy & Tracy, 2015).
Hence, having fast food is not a high involvement for consumer to consider clearly. Therefore, cognitive message strategy would not be able to affect consumer purchase decision making in this case.
Hypothesis 3:
Cognitive message strategy has mutual affect towards consumer purchase decision making in Hong Kong fast food industries.
5. Research Method
· Research approach
Quantitative approach, a quantitative or numeric description of trends, opinion or attitudes of a sample size group by studying them, would be applied (John, 2014). .
· Method to collect data
Online survey and a experiments of observation will be apply as a method to ebsite would be shared through certain platforms and observing how many customers will purchase fast food after receiving the message of specific advertisement.
· Sampling Frame
Since this research is focus on consumer purchase decision towards fast food industry in Hong Kong, the sampling frame will be targeted on Hong Kong people whom frequently have fast food for their meal such as three times a week.
· Sampling Size
The factors that need to be concern while conducting questionnaire would be the margin of error or accuracy of data which how much data are acceptable and useful for this research. The accuracy is related to how accurate the collected data is and how reliable closed to the population of the questionnaire is so as to generate precise information which the information is accurate +- 10% of a sample size of around 100, +- 5% of a sample size of 400 and +- 1% of a sample size of 10,000 (Aamir, 2014). Thus, the sampling size conducted in this research would be chose to be 150 questionnaires as the sampling size which the sampling size would be efficient to generate precise information with accuracy.
· Sampling Technique
Since online survey will be conducted as a means of data collection, simple random sampling technique will be applied which its bias free (Haque, nn). Besides, cluster sampling and snow ball sampling techniques would be applied as well while cluster sampling would divide interviewee with habit of having fast food frequently and snow ball sampling is one of technique to interview interviewee by social network.
· Questionnaire Design
In order to prevent interviewee errors and maintain accuracy of the data, screening question, listed question and rating question will be listed on the questionnaire included personal information instead of applying open ended question and ranking question.
· Scale Evaluation
Validity and reliability are important, thus, the questionnaire would address all section of each variables and standardize all wordings with no decision making for interviewee involved as same as the layout and format. Hence, the data collected is reliable and valid.
· Analysis Techniques
To test the data reliability and validity, reliability test and factor analysis will be applied. Besides, to test the relationship of each variables, multi-regression analysis will apply to analysis relationship between each variables.
6. Timeline of dissertation
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Week 1 |
Search appropriate research topic |
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Week 2 |
Select appropriate research topic |
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Week 3 |
Conduct literature review |
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Week 4 |
Draft dissertation outline |
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Week 5 |
Finalize dissertation outline |
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Week 6-8 |
Discuss with supervisor and make improvement of dissertation outline |
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Week 9 |
Draft questionnaire outline |
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Week 10 |
Design questionnaire |
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Week 11-14 |
Finalize questionnaire and conduct it |
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Week 15-16 |
Conduct detailed literature review |
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Week 17-18 |
Conduct data analysis |
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Week 19 |
Finish introduction and background |
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Week 20-21 |
Finish literature review |
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Week 22-23 |
Finish data description and data analysis |
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Week 24 |
Finish research Methods |
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Week 25-26 |
Finish conclusion and recommendation |
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Week 27 |
Finish remaining section of research |
Reference
Mark, D. J., James, K. B. & James, E. (2001). Convenience, Accessibility, and the Demand for Fast Food. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Vol 26, No. 1, pp 58-74. Retrieved from http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/31162/1/26010058.pdf
Oxford Dictionaries. (2017). English Oxford Living Dictionaries. Retrieved from
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fast_food
Youfa, W., Liang, W., Hong, X. & Weidong, Q. (2016). A Review of the Growth of the Fast Food Industry in China and Its Potential Impact on Obesity, Vol 13, No 11, pp 1112. Retrieved from
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5129322/
Chris, L., Annie, L. & Caroline, L. (2017). HRI Food Service Sector Annual Report 2016. Retrieved from
John, W. C. (2017). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (4th ed). Washington DC: Sage Publications
Kenneth, E. C. & Donald B. (2007). Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communication (3th ed). Harlow: Pearson Education
Aamir, O. (2014). Sample Size Estimation and Sampling Techniques for Selecting a Reprehensive Sample. Journal of Health Specialties, Vol 2, No 4, pp 142-147. Retrieved from
Gulnara, Z. K. (2014). Defining Advertising: A Carnivalesque Perspective. International Journal of Journalism and Mass Communication, Vol 1, No 1, pp 002-010. Retrieved from
Hafeez, U. R., Mudasar M., Nabilla N., Waism U. R. & Sara, N. (2014). Impact of Effective Advertising on Consumer Buy Behavior: A Study of Laptop Purchaser in Pakistan. Retrieved from
https://www.textroad.com/pdf/JBASR/J.%20Basic.%20Appl.%20Sci.%20Res.,%204(3)224-231,%202014.pdf
Christy, A. & Tracy, T. (2015). Creative Strategies in Social Media Marketing: An Exploratory Study of Branded Social Content and Consumer Engagement. Psychology and Marketing, Vol 33, No 1, pp 15-27. Retrieved from
http://tracytuten.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ashley_et_al-2015-Psychology__Marketing.pdf
Kumar, D. P. & Raju, K. V. (2013). The Role of Advertising in Consumer Decision Making. Journal of Business and Management, Vol 14, No 4, pp 37-45.
Retrieved from
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b73f/90fd9441e0e2f0c654a9375da5730b08a8d8.pdf
https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:189583&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF
