Saturday 27 May 2017

Industrial Investigation Primary Research

So, I made it to blog post number 7, yay!  That means however, it’s almost the end of second year and almost the end of college – scary stuff.  For my last post, I thought I’d do a roundup of the findings from the rest of my primary research for my industrial investigation – if you read my last two previous posts you will have seen I gave an overview from my focus group findings, so I won’t go over all that again!

The rest of the findings for the primary research was undertaken by conducting a survey and two observations.  All research undertaken was to help achieve one of the objectives set out. 

Survey Findings
So, as part of the primary research, I created questions for a survey and put it online.  This survey helped fulfil the objective ‘the number of consumers buying in-store versus online’ that was set out in the original rationale.  This survey showed that where consumers preferred to shop was almost split halfway, as 53% said they preferred online shopping and 47% said they preferred shopping in-store.  They were then asked which method they used most often, and these results showed that 53% said that they used a mixture of both.  The findings from this whole survey suggested that even though consumers prefer to buy things online nowadays, there is still room for in-store shopping as both methods have positive and negatives to them.

Observation Findings
For the final part of the primary research, two observations were carried out in the form of a communications audit.  This was to achieve the objective ‘to find out how different industries use online platforms and social media to promote themselves’.  The observations were based on the online company Missguided to compare the number of posts on their Instagram page versus the number of their adverts seen on TV – to see how an online company makes use of the promotional mix.  As I suspected, Missguided made much more use of social media than they did with the likes of traditional media.  Their Instagram page – which was what was being recorded – had multiple posts per day, promoting their products and reposting pictures of their customers in their clothing.  Missguided’s TV advertising however, was much less frequent, and the only channels that they were seen advertising on was E4 and MTV.  This works well for them though with the little TV advertising they do as their viewer are mainly younger who fit to their target market demographic.  From these findings, it showed that Missguided – an online company – are more likely to promote themselves using online platforms such as social media.  Since doing this investigation, I have also seen that Missguided are now doing Snapchat advertising.  This is a fairly new way of advertising and allows Missguided to reach their target market.


Throughout this whole investigation, I found the research, and specifically the primary research, fun to undertake.  I enjoyed finding out what different people and age groups had to say about the way they like to shop and it was interesting to compare how an online company uses their promotional mix versus a traditional company uses theirs.

1 comment:

  1. Did you enjoy carrying out your investigation as a whole? And how did you find writing a blog - do you think it's something you might do again in the future?

    ReplyDelete