Essay Assignment #2
Topic: Qualitative Data Collection to Understand Consumers
There are several key things to look for:
Make a research question and set target consumers for the assignment. For instance, “What are the barriers to non-native international students’ Gamecocks football game attendance?” Provide clarification in your essay. Then, you will collect qualitative data to answer your research question. The grading criteria will be a novelty of your question and whether it is valid from a marketing point of view.
Choose a method for collecting data among in-depth interview, ethnography, and online community observations (e.g., online forums and social media).
Give the reasons why you choose that research question and data collection method.
Find proper sites to collect data. For example:
In-depth interview: If you are interested in sport brand consumers, then you can stay at the Nike store and ask people to have an interview.
Ethnography: If you are interested in Gamecocks football fans, then you can go to the Williams-Brice Stadium to observe their behavior.
Online community observation: If you are interested in Golden States Warriors fans, visit their social media account, and observe their posts and fans’ responses to them.
While collecting the data, you should make some notes based on your observations.
Make some tables for coding the data. You should provide these tables at the end of your essay. You can take pictures of your hand-drawing tables or insert fancy tables in Word. The tables will not be counted in page limits.
Focus on target consumers’ demographic characteristics, motives, values, attitudes, behaviors, etc. You can refer to Kotler’s black box model of consumer behavior in Chapter 3 or state-of-being/mind segmentations in Chapter 4.
Clarify the time, date, sites, and target of the observation.
Suggest findings regarding your research question.
Ex) I found non-native international students have fewer chances to attend the game because their involvement in the Gamecocks community is relatively low. Also, they prefer other sports to football.
Demonstrate what you learned from this assignment. It can be the challenges for collecting the data or the strengths/limitations of qualitative data.
