- It needs to be the right size, shape, colour or variety.
- It needs to be at the right price.
- It needs to be available at a time and in a quantity which matches when and where the customer wishes to buy it.
Different types of marketing strategies that I will use.
- Swot Analysis – This looks at the factors that might affect the success or failure of a marketing strategy. It is a technique which, requires the business to look at its internal strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats.
- Ansoff Matrix – This matrix plots how safe or risky various marketing objectives are and can be used by a business to likelihood of success.
- Boston Matrix – This is used to plot the percentages of the market enjoyed by each product against the type of market that it is in.
- Product Life Cycle – This can be used to see if its worth spending marketing money on a particular product.
- Pestel – This is a further way of looking at a companies external factors
- The Marketing Mix – A main variable through which a firm carries out its marketing strategy, often known as the four Ps
- Market Segmentation – This breaks down the market into groups of customers who share similar needs and buying characteristics.
Market research
There are two main types of market research, primary and secondary.
Primary Research
Primary research is the gathering of data first hand that is relevant to the company’s own product. Primary Research is either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative research produces numerical data, which involves the use of questionnaires and structured interviews. The attempt is to be objective by locating and explaining social facts. Qualitative research relies on observation (participant and non participant) and unstructured interviews, which produces descriptive accounts of the participants’ lives and actions, such as buying patterns.
Types of primary research might include:
Surveys – surveys can come in the form of a questionnaire, which consist of written questions. The questions may be open or closed ended questions. Open-ended questions are more valid as the respondents can express what is important to them, but the data is harder to analysis as all answers will be different. Closed ended questions are easy to sort and graph, but respondents are limited to using the answers and categories provided by the researcher. Postal questionnaires – these avoid interviewer bias but have low response rates.
Telephone research – this form of primary research is one of the quickest types but results tend to be an unrepresentative sample of the country.
Observation – this the simplest form of primary research as you just observe what is happing around you. For example to count the number of red cars that go past in an hour. Another good thing that observation does is to watch customers at point of sales such as there body language.
Structured interviews – are questionnaire that are administered by a researcher.
Unstructured interviews – these do not have question that would have been preset by the researcher, they are more like a conversation
Longitudinal research – or panel studies follow a group of people over an extended period, periodic data collection. They are usually large-scale quantitative studies, but participant observation can also be longitudinal.
Secondary research
Secondary research is data that has already been produced by someone else such as the government or companies. Secondary can also be either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative could be letters or diaries and quantitative could be government statistics.
Types of secondary research could include:
Official statistics – statistical data produced by central and local governments and government agencies. Official statistics are produced in vast quantities, and provide a rich source of information for researchers, much of it impossible for researchers to obtain themselves.
Historical Sources – these are vital for studying long-term social changes. However statistics sources suffer from some possible problems of reliability and validity as modern-day statistics.
Life Documents – these are documents created by individuals, which record subjective states, these include diaries, letters, photos, biographies etc.
Mass Media – the mass media includes newspapers, magazines and the factual television shows such as the news. The mass media may be unreliable for providing factual information.
All the above types of secondary research are likely to be available on the World Wide Web. Which is a network that is available through out the world so that people can obtain information and for companies to advertise there products or services.
For my market research I have only a questionnaire for my primary research and the Nike website () for my secondary research but I do plan to use other sources of secondary research information such as static’s from trade magazines.
Why choose a questionnaire
The advantages of a questionnaire
- Large amount of data can be collected quickly.
- There is little personal involvement by researchers.
- Access to subjects is easy
- It is easy to quantify the results, find correlations and use multivariate analysis to look for causes.
- Comparative analysis and replication (repeating the questionnaire) are easy, making the results reliable.
- A large, geographically dispersed sample can be used, increasing the representative ness of the data and ability to generalize.
- Useful for collecting straightforward, descriptive data.
- Very user friendly as everybody knows what to do with a questionnaire.
Market segmentation
Market segmentation means analysing a market to identify the different types of consumer. By matching the consumer categories to the type of product on offer, unfilled market niches may emerge. The potential profitability of filling these gaps can then be assessed. The main ways in which a market can be segmented are:
- Demographically, e.g. by age, social class or gender
- Psychographically (by attitudes and tastes) e.g. trendy versus staid, or home loving versus adventurous
- Geographically, by region
I will look at the Demographical studies for my market research
- - Under 13. I have chosen these products for this age group, as they are young children who don’t take much care of there belonging. Also children of these ages grow out of there clothes and shoes quite quickly, so parents are not going to want to pay a high price for clothes that are not going to last very long. This is why the clothes don’t need to be of an high quality
- - 13-19. This group are all teenagers. The majority will be at school. Teenagers of this age might not know what there main interests are as they can change there minds quite quickly. This is why I have aimed general equipment at them that are not of a high quality as they may get though each item in a short space of time. I will aim general clothing at this age group as it will be good advertising for Nike because young people of this age tend to wear sporting clothing all the time.
- - 20-39 the product that I will aim at this age group will be of a higher quality as they will be more serious about what sport they want to do, and so will be prepared to pay more to insure that they get the best they can for their purpose.
- – Over 39 the general equipment that I will aim at this age group is similar to group c. As people of this age group are going to be very serious about they’re sporting hobbies and so are going to want a good quality of products.
