Month: January 2021

Categories
Marketing

Marketing Research Quantitative Survey Fielding Reflections

Marketing Research: Qualitative Fielding Survey Reflections

Marketing post this time! It’s the 4th post of the year and if you followed the narrative it’s time for a marketing post! Recently, I had the chance to carry out end to end planning and execution of a marketing research for my work on Branding and Pricing Strategy.

I learned marketing research in school, and ran researches while at NTU Students’ Union. Planning, fielding and analysing. Back then, I didn’t realise how hard fielding was. It was just a mass EDM (Email Direct Mailer not Electronic Dance Music) to the whole school, and gifts were provided to participants.

Marketing Research: Problem

Initially, I thought that fielding this survey would be a walk in the park. How hard can it possibly be? I could not have been any more wrong than that.

Marketing Research: Photo of Cold Storage Tampines 1
I was standing right here at the entrance.

After 4 hours at night, standing outside the supermarket with aching arms and legs, there was only 15 respondents, half of what I planned to get in half the time. Reflecting on the experience, I faced 3 main problems:

Firstly, I was abruptly cut off and rejected on introductions.

Good Evening, I’m a Market Researcher from Company X……

I believe that the lag time before running away would likely be glancing for free gifts or maybe something else.

Secondly, I held my tablet with one arm, and definitely that was not the best thing to do. Furthermore, I was travelling with a laptop slung on me inside my bag. As a result, my body was aching all over at the end of the day.

Thirdly, many people were rushing for time and could not take 5 minutes off their schedule to complete the survey.

Either way, my study received minimal participation.

Marketing Research: Solution

After an unsuccessful night, I needed to find a simpler way to get participants to take part in the survey. With careful thought, I thought of 3 solutions:

Solution #1: Refine the Pitch, Starting with Pain Points

I figured out that the first few words spoken influences if customers will continue to listen, and to tie it to their interests. For instance, I did this pitch:

We’re looking at improving our product offering in Company X. Can we take 5 minutes of your time for a short survey?

I started with the customers’ pain point, basically what they came to the supermarket for — to meet their needs.

Naturally, more customers became open to conversation, especially when their needs are met.

Solution #2: Travel Light and Position Strategically

When I turned up for the second day of the survey, I left my laptop at home, only armed with my tablet and QR Code (More on the QR Code Later). Besides that, I also found a place to station at. This meant that I did not need to carry the heavy tablet for the whole day, and could focus on delivering the pitch and executing the survey! The location which I picked also has some foot traffic, which allows more chances to deliver the pitch!

I stationed myself at an ice box where I could leave my items and also reach customers.

Solution #3: Explore Alternative Methods for Participation

If the customers are rushing for time and just have no time, you can bring the survey to them! I printed a QR Code to allow customers to scan and carry out the survey on the go, which solves the rush hour problem. In addition, when I went to the store on a weekend, I noticed the long queues forming. Instantly, I jumped onto the opportunity to survey the customers in the queue! When customers are already there and do not spend additional time, they are more open to being surveyed!

Did up a QR Code! Intentionally Truncated the QR so that it can’t be used!

Marketing Research: What more can be done?

While I did finish my survey after 3 days? What could I have done better? If I had more time to plan, I would have set up an actual booth, and prepare gift vouchers from the company as incentive for taking part in the survey.

Marketing research on a weekend!
Fielding my research on a weekend well spent!

Closing Words

Finally, I hope that this reflection provided a new perspective on improving your quantitative marketing research. I wish you aspiring market researchers the best of luck in your next research!

If you liked this post, do check out our course review on the Mini Masters in Marketing Management at NBS, where I have also reviewed about the marketing research course.

In addition, if you liked reading about this post, do follow us on our LinkedIn Page. Also, you might want to read about learning analytics versus marketing!

Image Credits: Original Photography from Tan Wei Xiang

Categories
Innovation

Business Model Innovation: DIY Bakery

Business Model Innovation: DIY Bakery

It’s the third post of the Business Model Innovation series and also the third post of the year! In this new normal, the traditional bakery businesses have been hit very hard. While there is less people out on the streets, which means less customers, how can bakery businesses cope? This is where your opportunity lies! You can start your own bakery business right here and now!

As usual, we will be doing our analysis with the business model canvas. Also, we would like to thank one of my colleagues, who always bakes and brings her best creations to share, which inspired me to write this post! There’s no hard and fast rule to run this bakery, so get innovative in the comments below!

Unique Value Proposition

We provide you the freshest baked artisan bread and pastry, right in the comfort of your homes!

We deliver this UVP through a DIY kit of ingredients. Furthermore, this kit comes with a recipe, so you can replicate the best bakes, right in the comfort of your own kitchen.

Customer Segments

Younger people, who have picked up the hobby of baking, while they spend more time at home, are our potential customers. A large proportion are likely females, who may value surprises a lot.

Key Partners

The core partners of the business are Bakers, Patisseries and Chefs, whom we can co-innovate with. These partners will be key to develop the recipes which are not only wallet-friendly, but also easy to execute in the kitchen.

Key Activities

Some key activities includes prospecting for sales to customers, as well as enrolling more professional F&B veterans onto the platform.

Key Resources

Online channels for enablement and distribution of recipes.

Supply and logistics network, which impacts the fulfilment of the orders.

Customer Relationship

We may want to consider having a platform, which is necessary for customers to stay excited and expressive. Therefore, creating an Instagram page where customers can showcase their best bakes weekly might be one way to go about it. Furthermore, we can run contests on the Instagram page, for customers to showcase their own creations, stand a chance to be featured on our Instagram, and win exclusive prices.

Channels

An omni-channel approach could be taken, which consists of both online and offline channels.

We could have a website and application for e-commerce transactions. This can be supplemented with Instagram, which trends among the young people.

We could do offline marketing at partner bakeries, where there may be foot traffic but not too many buyers due to hygiene concerns. By including a QR code to purchase our baking tools and ingredients online, the expertise in the physical bakeries will not go to waste.

Cost

You will incur the following costs:

Cost of goods sold, basically to simply put it, the cost of the raw materials in the ingredients.

Platform fees to maintain your website.

Transportation and Supply chain, which is essential in bringing your products to the consumer.

Marketing expenditure is also one of the costs which are incurred.

(Rental does not apply in this case, as this business is more logistical and taps on the capital investment of existing F&B establishments.)

Revenue

You can consider these revenue streams:

Per Unit Sales Model, where customers can order through a system.

Subscription model, where customers enrol in a monthly membership to be surprised with new recipes every week!

Advertisement revenue, which can be gotten through sponsored recipes with larger businesses, for instance Gardenia or Sunshine Bread factory in Singapore.

At last, this is a DIY Bakery business summarised in one page! Do let us know if this worked for you!

Are you interested in exploring other business ideas? Please drop us a note at businessmodel@tanweixiang.com.

If you liked reading about this post, do follow us on our LinkedIn Page. You may also like to build your own ramen restaurant, hair salon or photo studio!

Image Credits: Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Categories
Management

Working while Studying, Studying while Working (NBS Graduate)

Welcome to our second post of 2021! As promised in the last post of last year to be more regular in posting the various topics in this blog, we are catering to our management enthusiasts who may be on campus, or learning in other ways. As analysed in our previous post, we have quite a sizeable portion of student readers, we also wanted to create a post more catered to professionals who may want to go back to school to increase knowledge too! I previously shared about why I decided to return to school, but this post will be more targetted at my thoughts on schooling while working, and also while I was working while schooling while on my internship at KavoKerr. Here are some of my thoughts:

Improving Time Management Skills

I have received various questions on how I manage to work and study at the same time for last year, while also running an active blog. How do I find all the time? One of the techniques which I used was to have more time management. Part and parcel of my learning journey was to create pockets of time reserved for various activities. This meant scheduling time on my calendar to complete my coursework, as well as internship or work activities without cannibalising either activities. It helped that there was a timetable at school and I planned my internship around my remaining modules. The true challenge for me this month is that now I’m entrusted with a major work project, and how I’m going to continue to deliver with excellence, I believe that time management will be key. Do read more about time management in this post.

Learning to Prioritise

Knowing that we have limited time, knowing how to set our priorities is crucial in ensuring that we get the most.

For my current priorities, I ranked them as work first, classes and preparation next, blog post third (but rest assured you’ll see the posts you expect to see!), exercise, hanging out with friends, catching more sleep if possible (please don’t reduce sleep priority for too long, usually I’m an advocate that you sleep for minimally 8 hours a day, but please do not go less than 6 hours, I tried it before and do not recommend it!

Knowing this is only a 4 months long arrangement with 1 month having to work weekends too, it is something which I could manage. But that being said, I strongly urge you to know when and what you should prioritise, to prevent burnout. (It’s not the best feeling to have, felt it when doing 7 CCAs in Year 1 at school but that’s a story for another day!)

Maximising Value and Efficiency

Something I learned about studying while working is that we can’t be too perfect at everything, as we have limited time. Gone are the days where we could do multiple revisions of the coursework that we want to submit, in order to try to get the perfect score at school.

This is one of the times when we can apply Pareto’s Principle where we use 20% of the time to complete 80% of the work. While completing my coursework to a deliverable standard, I can gain 80% of the knowledge with just 20% of the time, this meant that I would be able to learn enough about what I am learning at school, without compromising on my work responsibilities.

Well that’s all for today’s reflection. If you’re considering to work while studying to gain more experience or study while working to gain more knowledge, I would urge you to consider your time, priorities and how you can maximise your efficiency, in order to achieve the best of both worlds!

If you liked our post, do bookmark this site, or follow us on our LinkedIn page as we look forward to creating new content for you every week.

Image Credits: Original Image created by Tan Wei Xiang, using image by Wengang Zhai on Unsplash

If you’re still in school, here’s a post for you to make the most out of your business school experience.

If you are interested in pursuing the Mini Masters in Marketing Management, do check this post out on course reviews.

Categories
Analytics

Using Google Analytics to Discover our Tops and Flops of 2020

A graph of our cyclical performance over the months.

Welcome to our first post of 2021! As promised in the previous post to be more regular in posting the various topics in this blog, we are kick starting the year with analytics to discover our top 5 and bottom 5 posts (credit the tops and flops inspiration from one of my colleagues who loves to use that in her weekly review at work), to better understand the content which interests you, the reader!

From the cover slide, we can somewhat see that the traffic has been rather cyclical, perhaps we can expand more on that trend in future but today, let us take a look at the top 5 and bottom 5 posts in the past 6 months. While we are currently 1200 users strong, you might also be interested in looking at our previous Google Analytics Analysis of our first 500 users.

When dealing with analytics, as usual, we want to ask questions which we want to answer. Through the behaviour overview, and full report of Google Analytics we want to know what our best and worst performing posts were.

What are our Top 5?

We were able to discover our top 5 posts (In terms of viewership, from the highest to lowest):
1. Nanyang Business School Business Analytics Module Selection Guide
2. 3 Reasons Why I picked a Specialisation in Business Analytics at Nanyang Business School
3. University Internship Hunting Guide (Tips from NTU NBS Graduate with 3 MNC Internship Experiences)
4. General and Unrestricted Electives Guide – From NBS Business (Business Analytics) Graduate
5. Which Major to Pick? Business Analytics vs Marketing (Ex-NBS Student)

These 5 posts contribute to a total of 37% of all our page views, even though they made up about 25% of all content.

What are our Flop 5?

We also managed to pick out our flop 5 posts (From the lowest to highest in viewership):
1. COVID-19 Pandemic: Should I Start Work or Go Back to School?
2. Business Model Template: Photo Studio
3. 6 things to do for 2 Hours in Stuttgart, Germany
4. Integrating Analytics and Management: Where and How to Start?
5. Key Takeaways from my In-office turned Work-from-Home Internship

These 5 posts contribute to 4.2% of all our page views, much less than the 25% of all our posts in 2020.

Additional Remark: The clear bottom fodders were the newer posts of Christmas Text Analytics and Hair Salon Business Model which we would exclude from the analysis as they have yet to pick up, but I urge you to take a read as they are really interesting posts!

Making sense of the insights

Our Age Demographics for readership shows that 60% are youths, and a good 40% are non-youth readers.

From the top 5 posts, there is a clear indication that many students visit us and rely on the information posted here for advice on their curriculum needs. We are really humbled to be able to create impact for the student audience as we always try to pay it forward after learning from the knowledge of seniors and we urge you to pay it forward in future too!

We also noticed that it was an interesting trend that 40% of our users are a non-youth audience, and we are heartened that we are able to communicate analytics and innovation to an audience that we initially did not imagine to create impact for. Do let us know which content you love in the comments below!

For the flop 5 posts, one of the central themes which surround these posts is for instance, it being no longer specific to analytics, which we relaunched the blog on (yes we used to include lifestyle posts and travel.), or the very slight reference to the epidemic which shall not be named since this is risk of lowering the search engine score of this post (we instantly apply these insights!!). We hope to continue bringing new content and will continue to generate more content which caters to your hunger for learning about analytics, innovation and management!

Additional note: We initially wanted to add in a text analytics, but we realised that there isn’t enough posts to do that on this post without getting just words that are repeated non-stop. If you liked the text analytics, you could look at our ranked 6th post, What I learned from Text Mining 400 Spam Comments on my Blog using R, to see what spam users like to write in our comments section.

If you liked our post, do bookmark this site, or follow us on our LinkedIn page as we look forward to creating new content for you every week. Wishing you a Happy 2021!!!

Image Credits: Original Image created by Tan Wei Xiang