Marketing Research Online Grocery Store Survey and Report

Online Grocer Survey

Ashley Simms is determined to start up a new online grocery store with the hopes of stealing market share through website design and functionality. The manager problem that Ashley has is that she thinks she needs to understand the mindset of the online shopper to design the perfect website.  We will need to conduct a survey to explore and design a strategy. The first question we are concerned with is a discovery question of “why” are the online shoppers using the internet instead of going to the grocery store and picking out their own product. (Brown, Suter, & Churchill Jr., 2014, p. 45) Based on the above average family income and dual working household it is most likely to save time. The strategy-oriented question needs to be “how” do we save the online shopper more time? (Brown, Suter, & Churchill Jr., 2014, p. 46) Based on these findings the research problem should be “Assess preferences and reason why individuals primarily use online grocers and determine of preset menus could save shoppers even more time?” (Brown, Suter, & Churchill Jr., 2014, p. 47) With this research problem in mind the following survey was created:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PKZDWXC

When designing the survey it was decided to lead off with two filter questions to qualify the survey responders and verify if their data would be reliable for the intent of web design. (Brown, Suter, & Churchill Jr., 2014, p. 270) These first two filter questions were concerned with if the survey taker was primary shopper and how often they shop online.  The next two questions were both open ended questions which according to Brown, Suter & Churchill is a good to start off a survey. (Basic Marketing Research - Customer Insights and Managerial Action, 2014, p. 273) Both these open ended questions were meant to be exploratory to see why they shop online and how they prefer to search or find the groceries online. The remaining questions are all summated-ratings scale questions or “Likert” scale questions, with the exception of number six, meant to see how important each question is to the responder. (Brown, Suter, & Churchill Jr., 2014, p. 251) Question five was based on other competitor website and the various ways products could be searched.  This question asked the importance of each technique. The next question was more focused on what was the most important reason why they shopped online and was a close ended question with only three choices.  Number seven focused on importance of price comparison to see if these search feature needed to be added or if saving time was the primary focus.  Questions eight through ten were focused on verifying if automatic grocery list production based on a menu selection would be of interest to save the time of even having to make a grocery list. The survey creation was a fun experiment and really caused one to think about the flow of the survey and if the research problem was truly being addressed.

References

Brown, T. J., Suter, T. A., & Churchill Jr., G. A. (2014). Basic Marketing Research - Customer Insights and Managerial Action (8th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.