Measuring Shopper Attitudes and Behaviour for The Kellogg's Company - Research Proposal Example

Kellogg’s company research For most companies, the attitudes and behaviours that their customers portray towards their products is most important. This is due to the fact that such information goes a long way in ensuring that the companies adjust themselves and their products in order to meet the requirements and demands of their customers. It is in this regard that the Kellogg’s company has not been an exception. For the company to conduct research on the attitudes and behaviours of customers towards their products in Australia, qualitative research is the type of research that is going to be applied as it is most appropriate. Qualitative research is the type of research that does the collection, analysis and the interpretation of data that cannot be quantified in a meaningful manner or on the other hand cannot be summarised in terms of numbers. On the other hand, quantitative research is a more structured form of research which is also larger and has more representation in terms of respondents. Quantitative research also has the capability of being summarised into numbers for easier analysis (Parasuraman et al 178). For Kellogg’s case, the type of research that is going to be conducted is an explanatory research that is aimed at describing the behaviours of the customers towards the cereal and snack products in the Australian markets. For this type of research, the emphasis is made on the provision of insights on the behaviours and feelings of the Australian customers on the cereals and the snack products of the company’s. Here, qualitative methods of data collection would be most appropriate. This is due to the fact that the use of this type of research would come up with wide information on not only the factors that the customers feel about the products but would also bring out the emotional attachment that some customers may have with the products, which would otherwise be difficult to capture with quantitative methods. Due to the infinite patterns related to variations in the markets that customers portray, the use of qualitative methods would ensure that these variations are captured and an understanding of the range and also the extent of segregation of customers is made. Additionally, the meanings, attachment and reasons accompanying the behaviours that the customers expose towards the products would be easily captured. Additionally, the motivations that are either held consciously or subconsciously by the same customers would be known (Mariampolski 24). The qualitative method of collecting data would be recommended in the case of this particular research for Kellogg’s as a company. Thus would involve the use of focus group interviews, also known as focus group discussions (FGDs). This involves the use of a discussion leader who also acts as the moderator for the interviews. The role of the moderator is to do the introduction of the topics that are being researched on to the group in a structure that is non-fashioned and which is also natural. He or She is responsible for ensuring that the group understands the objectives of the discussion. The data collected here would either be recorded or noted down by an assistant to the moderator. Data collected from focus groups are normally rich with information, are versatile and also gets more information from customers with special requirements. There could also be the use of key informant interviews. This is where people who are viewed as being key informants on the products of the company such as some members of the focus groups, the company’s suppliers or the other business people who sell the products of the company in Australia could be asked key questions regarding the reactions that they receive about the products from the customers who purchase the products. With these key informants, the questions would be structured in a manner that their responses would not be quantified like as the case is with quantitative research. They would be open-ended and would have the capability of giving the respondent the freedom to express themselves in a broad manner in order to get more information from them. The information from such interviews could even cover areas that had been left out (Parasuraman et al 180-200). Before conducting the research, it would be fundamental to begin with making a decision on the respondents that are going to be targeted. For the focus group interviews, it is recommended that groups of people ranging from a minimum of six to a maximum of twelve be used. This would be of importance because the moderator in the focus group of such smaller numbers would easily control such a small numbered group as compared to larger ones. It would also be easier to access the smaller group for successive meetings as compared to larger groups. This would be important if a follow up research would be conducted on a later date (Parasuraman et al 181). There shall be a criterion that shall be used in selecting the respondents that shall be included in the groups. This is due to the fact that in order to get the relevant data required, the selection of the right respondents who shall be part of the groups is important. To begin with, the target respondents would be people from the country who are consumers of the cereals and snack products that the company sells in the country. After the consumers have been established, they would be screened individually by the people responsible for the recruitment of the respondents. The aim of doing this is to ensure that the respondents that are conversational in nature, creative in their way of thinking and extrovert are included in the group (Roe 70). The selection of the key informants would either be done from the focus groups that have been established or from the suppliers or other people in the company’s products chain. When selecting the key informants from the focus group, consideration would be based on those who hold exceptional and also expert knowledge on the culture and the processes of interactions of the group and have an advanced knowledge on the products and the dynamics that are related to the products of the company that are being researched on. In the research, the key informants become more of collaborators rather than only passive respondents (Daymon & Holloway 154). The size of the sample to be used for this research shall be based on the funding that is availed by the company itself and the overall amount of time allocated for the research. This is due to the reason that in conducting qualitative research, there are no rules that have been set for the sample size and formulas for deciding the sample size (Carson et al 103). As compared to other types of research which involves large samples that are highly structured, for a qualitative research such as this particular one, their samples may seem as being more selective and lacking representativeness. This is due to the fact that this research does not try to produce data that can be generalised from samples that are statistically robust. It aims at producing results that give insights and facts that are understandable and meet the needs of the company in terms of the behaviours of customers towards the cereals and snack products sold in Australia. This is the reason as to why there is the selection of the respondents in the initial stage. This aids in ensuring that the selected respondents would be from a chosen target market and would give data that is rich of information (Chandler & Owen 87). The data that would be collected from these respondents is what is going to represent the general views of the other people who consume the snacks and cereal products from the company. The advantage that comes with this is that redundancy of data, which is quite normal with quantitative data, would be reduced. Being told to present the finding of the research in two weeks would mean that some changes would have to be done so as to meet the target. A major change would be on the sample size that is selected to work with. As stated earlier, the determination of the sample size would be based on the amount of money allocated for the research and the time given. The longer the time would mean the bigger the sample size to be used. For the case where the time is shortened to two weeks, it would mean that a smaller sample size would be used so as to have the capability of collecting the data and because the data shall consequently be small, its analysis would take a shorter time. As a result, it would mean that shorter periods of time would be used in conducting the preparation of the report and therefore the findings would be presented within the required period of time. Work Cited Carson, D et al. Qualitative Marketing Research. Sage Publications, 2005. Chandler, J. & Owen, M. Developing Brands with Qualitative Market Research. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Daymon, C. & Holloway, I. Qualitative Research Methods in Public Relations and Marketing Communications. Oxon: Routledge, 2011. Mariampolski, H. Qualitative Market Research: A Comprehensive Guide. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001. Parasuraman,A., Grewal, D. & Krishnan, R. Marketing Research. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Roe, M. Market Research in Action. London: Thomson Learning, 2004. Read More