FInal Project Analyzation

Would Hosting Cooking Demonstrations Improve Trader Joe’s Profits

A Market Research Study

We set out on this survey Saturday afternoon, 11 September 2010, to examine if Trader Joe’s were to hold weekly cooking demonstrations would the company see an increase in profits due to the clientele purchasing the products being featured in the demonstration. In order to examine if holding the demonstrations would even be useful to the company, we began by asking questions that would help us determine if most of the customers of the store are loyal to the store or if they just stop in occasionally, because if most people just stop in occasionally they will not be likely to come on the day of the demonstration and therefore would not make an impact in the company’s sales. According to our survey that 58% of the customers interviewed shop at Trader Joe’s between 3-6 times per month and 80% make 1-6 purchases per month. From this information we can see that most of customers who shop at Trader Joe’s are in fact loyal customers and therefore would most likely attend a cooking demonstration, in fact 68% of those polled said that they would be somewhat likely or likely to attend the demonstrations, and therefore the demonstrations would be a chance for the company to sell and suggest new products to its customers that they may not normally have tried before.

The customers who already loyally shop at the company shop there for many different reasons including the quality of products, the organic options that are offered, and the fair and reasonable prices. These entice the customers to make purchases at the store and their purchases are quite substantial considering the low prices of the goods. When surveyed, 76% of the participants said that they purchased between $21-$40 per transaction at the store. If this number could be raised even by $10 per transaction by the introduction of the new products being demonstrated in the cooking demonstrations the company would see their profits rise.

When surveyed however only 30% (15) of the customers had attended cooking demonstrations in the past and then only 46.6% (7) of those customers actually purchased the products that were featured. This may or may not be a good result for Trader Joes. Perhaps previously the cooking demonstrations featured products that were too pricey for the customers to purchase, or maybe they were too specialized to be used for more than one distinct recipe. In order for Trader Joe’s to ensure sales of their featured products I would feature products that can be easily used in everyday recipes that are known to a vast majority of customers, and also choose products that are not too expensive that a customer would be able to easily add to their shopping cart without too much hesitation.

Overall I feel that the information gathered from the survey indicates that if Trader Joe’s were to implement weekly cooking demonstrations that they would see a rise in product sales and company profits.

Final Project Graphs

Final Project Hypothesis

If Trader Joe's were to hold weekly cooking demonstrations, would their sales increase due to the purchase of the featured product during the demonstration?

Week 9 EOC--Network

While watching the film Network in class it was hard to miss the parallels drawn to all of the marketing research topics that we have covered throughout the quarter. Faye Dunaway’s character Diana was the most obvious example of the marketing research that goes into the everyday workings of a national television company. She was constantly asking for ratings, talking about getting a higher market share, and using then taking that data and turning it into a profit for the company by being able to charge advertisers higher rates during those shows. A company such as UBS uses secondary data that was collected by another company (usually Neilsen for television) who gather and analyze the data and then send it to UBS so that they may take the information and plan accordingly. We begin to see how obsessed Diana is by this information near the very beginning of the film when she notices that ratings for the evening news hour went up 5 points overnight when Howard ‘told the truth’ to the public. From there she went on a crusade to make the show more popular by investing some money into it and eventually turning it into a huge spectacle that was watched across the country and helped UBS to come out of debt. Without the research and data that was collected by Neilsen and reported in a timely manner she would have never been able to notice that there was a heightened interest in Howard that one evening and then would have never been able to turn him into the cash cow that he became for the network. It does become somewhat pathetic though as this data overcomes Diana’s life and interferes at all possible times, from the beginning when she first witnesses Howard’s show with her husband and then later on her romantic getaway with Max the ratings and scandals of the network are all that she can talk about. So while this information can be (and is) extremely useful, one must wonder, at which point does it become too much and we experience information overload that we cannot overcome.

Week 9 BOC--Neilsen Ratings

Hundreds of channels, thousands of programs, millions of viewers. Our job is to decipher and deliver television data every day. How does a program achieve # 1 rank in Nielsen TV Ratings, and what does this mean? Our ratings aren’t qualitative evaluations of how much a program is “liked.” Instead, our ratings provide the simplest, most democratic measurement: How many people watched.

When Arthur Nielsen introduced the Audimeter (his first metering device) in 1936, there were only about 200 television sets in use worldwide. When the Nielsen national TV measuring service was established in 1950, the average American household that owned a television had only one set and received three network telecasts.

Today, the typical home has multiple television sets and well over 100 channels from which to choose. Likewise, our measurement technologies must constantly evolve to keep pace with daily innovations in consumer electronics.

With recent advances in electronics, viewing is no longer limited to the television set and content is available on multiple platforms. Computers and mobile devices have joined the television as places to view programming. Nielsen measures how people use and engage with content across these “three screens.”

(Neilsen website, http://en-us.nielsen.com/content/nielsen/en_us/measurement/tv_research.html)

Week 8 -- Mr Clean Jeans

In order to get the best experience of designer denim one cannot wash it in the washing machine with hot water and tons of soap and then throw them in the dryer, it would completely ruin them. The denim will no longer fit, it will be worn, and become too soft too quickly. It would seem that since the best thing about an amazing pair of denim is that they fit the wearer perfectly and the entire concept of the wash looses this aspect because the denim becomes distorted. Perhaps the best way to wash denim is by hand. Preferably in water that isn’t too hot and with a small amount of soap/detergent, following with an air drying process where the denim is lied flat on a surface. This way it allows for the denim to be ‘freshened up’ without having to withstand the tough washing environment which will ruin them. I feel as though somewhere I also once read that as odd as it may seem, wearing ones denim into the shower to wet them, washing them gently with detergent and then following with the air drying is the best process. This way when the denim is wet it can mold to the wearers body and then in the air drying process the shape will not become too far distorted because they are not being tossed about in a heat filled tumbling machine. Preferably this process would be done as little as possible, because truly how dirty does our denim get, perhaps a minor stain every now and then, but mostly they are worn for a day in which we did no strenuous activity and then taken off. I think that the best timing then would be to possibly do this about twice a year, so every six months. After all, designer denim is expensive, and we want it to last for quite a long time and have them possibly evolve into our favorite pair ever.

Answers

1. Carrefour Group

2. GM

3. Chrysler

4. Toyota, Honda, Nissan

5. Chrysler

6. Toyota, 34%