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.