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Background
Previously there was a prosperous line of convenience stores. We’ll call this number of stores “QuickStop”. At some point a staff-member realized that QuickStop seemed to be patronised by many more men than women.
This is passed along to the supervision team plus they asked your local store tellers to informally monitor the ratios of males to women who came into their very own stores. It had been that the theory seemed to carry true, in addition to fact much more men patronized QuickStop than did women.
This information was passed along to the other managers at other QuickStop stores and so they found a similar trend. This received several higher level managing attention and they began to wonder why it was occurring. Eventually management resolved that this was too large a group of potential customers to shed, and a decision was at some point made to analyze this phenomenon and to discover why it was taking place, and if nearly anything could be carried out about it.
Research Objective
A research project was designed to understand how females felt about shopping for QuickStop shops and how come. It was made a decision that this study should be qualitative and the particular methodology would be In-depth-Interviews (this is research with 1 professional interviewer and a single respondent at the same time , in this instance the decision was performed because there were suspicions that there could be hypersensitive issues that wouldn’t be discussed as candidly in a group setting).
Qualitative Research
Regarding two dozens of current or potential feminine customers had been paid to come into a research facility to talk about the use of grocery stores in general, and later in the interviews the discussion was directed specifically for QuickStop grocery stores, in particular. The results were very surprising for the management staff. The major qualitative findings includedthe following:
my spouse and i. Women seen convenience stores being primarily created for men, with little or no consideration for women
ii. The bathing rooms at grocery stores were considered to be the dirtiest that could be found in a city , “gross” was the most common description , which perception permeated everything that women felt about convenience stores in general
iii. QuickStop was known as one of the most severe of grocery stores “kind from the place for the man to acquire gas, have a six-pack of cheap beer and cigarettes, however, not the kind of place I want to go”.
Quantitative Study
Once the managing team recently had an understanding of what issues they faced with girl customers, they felt that they needed to appreciate how broadly these types of beliefs were hosted. Now they needed to get some good hard quantities, and that meant that they necessary to conduct quantitative market research. The research objective in this phase of research were:
i. Learn how female customers of QuickStop differ from those that don’t frequently visit these stores.
ii. Understand if a remodelling of QuickStop could lure each group to visit often (or whatsoever depending on if the respondent presently avoided QuickStop entirely).
Pertaining to the quantitative phase of research they will decided to execute 250 mobile phone interviews having a combination of feminine respondents. The requirements to participate in this stage of analysis were that: half of the participants stated that they had applied QuickStop by least 5 fold in the last year, as well as the other half publicly stated to purposely avoiding QuickStop altogether, although they did use other brands of convenience stores. The major resultsfrom the quantitative phase indicated that:
a. Above 76% of female QuickStop customers were women beneath 30 years aged, without children, while ladies with kids and with higher incomes were 5 times less likely to search at QuickStop
b. The good thing was that of the women who don’t currently use QuickStop, 64% said that if these shops were to bring up to date their color schemes, clean up their bathrooms boost their health insurance and feminine items that they would be willing to make an effort QuickStop again.
The two stages of exploration (qualitative & quantitative) offered the QuickStop management staff a very good knowledge of where that they currently was standing with girl customers and why. Their very own quantitative study also suggested that those ladies who were not presently using their shops would “forgive” them if they changed their techniques. Their decision now was going to decide if getting more middle-aged women as customers was worth the cost of updating their stores and spending more money to keep these people clean and nice, and better stocked together with the types of goods that middle-aged women with children required.
Research take note: in general when ever conducting two phases of research (in this case qualitative and quantitative market research) it’s frequently the case the first phase (qualitative research) is done first like a “lead-in”. Qualitative research tends to help the management team be familiar with underlying problems, and the second phase (quantitative in this case) helps to understand how pervasive/wide spread these feelings/attitudes are among a certain audience.
