Marketing&Essay Essay(Only conclusion Part***) (Consumer Behavior)

MKT 302 / Consumer Behavior, Fall 2016 Group Project Instructions

Overview This project will give you experience applying some of the concepts you’ve learned in class as you collect data on consumer behavior. It will also give you experience collaborating with your peers. I will provide you with topics to choose from, but you will still have a great deal of flexibility as to how you actually design your study and collect your data.

Written report – Due December 22. Your report should be ten pages maximum, double-spaced, including graphs, tables, etc. You must use 12-point font size. You may have a separate cover page that does not count in the ten- page limit. The executive summary also does not count in the ten-page limit. The report should at least include:

(1) An executive summary (max. 200 words; doesn't count in the page limit) (2) Introduction: Give some background on the problem or product being studied; describe the purpose of the study.

(3) Hypotheses: Say what you predict and why. This can be fairly short. (4) Experimental Design, Participants and Procedure: Say what you did in the experiments (e.g., treatment/control conditions, questions asked, number of participants and who they were etc.) (5) Results: Report relevant means and other appropriate summary statistics; don’t just say “many” or “a lot.” Tables, graphs, and figures convey results much more effectively, if appropriate. Inferential statistics, like t-tests and correlations, are not required, but if you feel comfortable using them, they may help you make your point. (5) Conclusions and marketing implications: Say what can be learned from your results and what a firm might do in response to the results. (6) Limitations of your project: Say what might keep your results from being generalizable and what you would do differently in follow-up studies. In addition to generic limitations (such as limited sample size), list other limitations that are more specific to your inquiry.

Group Project Report (45 points) will be based on the following criteria:

1. Creativity and interestingness of the hypotheses: 12 points 2. Report format (page limit, clarity, organization, etc.): 6 points 3. Literature review and theoretical development: 10 points 4. Description of procedures (i.e., the flow of the experiment): 6 points 5. Data analysis: 6 points 6. Conclusions and marketing implications: 3 points 7. Limitations of your project: 2 points

Oral presentation: The presentations will take place on December 22nd, December 27th and December 29th. I ask each group to email me your most preferred date of presentation, as well as your second and third choices (e.g., Most preferred: December 22nd, Second: December 29th, Third: December 27th). The days will be assigned on a first-come, first-serve basis. Because some of the exchange students in our class have to leave the country early, we will determine the presentation day for each group keeping in mind this constraint.

Your presentation (15 minutes) may contain the same sections that your written report contains. It is important that you communicate your study clearly to the rest of the class. Try to get the audience enthused about your topic; you are encouraged to use ads, demonstrations, PowerPoint, etc., to make the topic interesting to the class. You may have one spokesperson for the group, or you may share speaking roles among several group members.

If you are using PowerPoint, I strongly suggest that you bring a backup (or several backups) of your slides to class, either in the form of overheads or in the form of extra saved copies. As a further backup, you can email your presentation to me. Group Project Presentation (25 points) will be based on the following criteria:

1. Presentation quality (clear explanations of main points, logical organization, visual aids, clear language, material pertinent to the subject, etc.): 10 points

2. Communication skills (engaging manner, properly answering questions, not reading from notes excessively, poise and posture): 6 points

3. Identification of key findings (do not talk about all your findings; focus on those you think are key take-aways): 5 points

4. Time management (neither too long nor too short): 4 points

Grading (55/300 points possible)

 The written report will be graded out of 45/300 points (15% of total grade).

 The oral presentation will be graded out of 25/300 points (~8% of total grade).

 Within a group, all members will initially earn the same grade. However, I will ask each group member to evaluate the contributions of his/her fellow members. If someone is consistently identified as having not contributed, or contributed more than their fair share to the group, that person’s score will be adjusted.

Topics: Select one of the following topics. The topics will give you general guidelines, but the precise implementation of your topic is up to you. Feel free to be creative! If your group has an idea that doesn’t fit into one of these topics, please see me, and we can talk about whether it would be appropriate. Your hypotheses will be more interesting if you used two independent variables to study their interactive effects on relevant outcomes. For example, do not just study the impact of blind tasting on preferences (e.g., people can’t distinguish between Coca-Cola and Pepsi in blind tasting). Also consider, for example, how tasting in a group (vs. alone) can interact with the impact of blind tasting on preferences. One hypothesis could be that the impact of blind tasting on the preference for a soda brand would be stronger when people taste it in groups than alone. IMPORTANT FOR ALL TOPICS: TO GUARANTEE YOUR PARTICIPANTS’ PRIVACY, DO NOT VIDEOTAPE OR PHOTOGRAPH THEM IN ANY WAY!

1. Price Recall Assignment: Examine consumers’ memories for prices. Accompany a friend on a trip to a store,

observe your friend’s behavior. Just after s/he pays, conduct a price recall task. Do this for 15 to 20 friends, total, but observe and test them one by one. Make sure that the store is one where people tend to buy many items (e.g., supermarket, Migros, Carrefour). Also, make sure that your friends do not know that their memories will be evaluated.

Analysis: Use the actual receipt to evaluate performance. Make sure you define a priori what will qualify as a correct versus incorrect answer. Some questions you may want to address include: Evaluate overall recall. Does recall differ as a function of individual variables, such as gender? Does recall differ as a function of environmental factors, such as the type of product purchased, the order of products purchased, whether there were certain in-store specials, or whether the shopper had a shopping list? You might also analyze “how incorrect” the answers were. What are the implications of these findings for the marketing strategies of the products or stores you examined?

2. Consumer Perception: Blind product test Assignment: Conduct a “blind” test for various brands of any one product, such that participants evaluate the product without seeing the brand name. This can be a taste test, but you can also be creative and evaluate a non-food product. (For example, do Selpak paper towels really seem like the “softest” when participants don’t know which brand of paper towels they’re evaluating?) The project will probably be most interesting for you if you can compare a few national brands to one or more private-label (generic, e.g., Migros) brands.

Note: Do not test any alcoholic beverages or medications! (You might also want to avoid testing brands of bottled water. Many groups have done this in the past, and the results are rarely very interesting.)

Ask 15-20 friends to participate and to try each brand. Without telling them the identity of the brands, ask them for their impressions of each product they try. Collect overall ratings of how much participants liked each sample, but also collect ratings specific to the dimension you’re testing (that is, for a taste test, ask a few different questions about taste; if you were testing paper towels, you might instead ask a few questions about absorbency or softness). When participants are finished, you might also ask which product they liked best.

Analysis: Some questions you may want to address include: Which brand, if any, emerged as the favorite? How did you determine this? Is the favorite generally a popular brand, or were you surprised by the winner? If consumers had a favorite before sampling, did that brand “win” in the blind test? Did the results differ for different groups of consumers (e.g., men vs. women; frequent vs. infrequent consumers of the product)? What are the implications of this test for the marketing strategies of the brands you tested?