Technical Report, Sample, flower shop survey

Sample: Flower shop survey

Design of the survey

The survey involved 1,200 respondents over the age of 15. Those between ages 20 and 50 were regarded as key clients and were specially targeted. The respondents were drawn from neighbourhood of the twelve intended retail outlets of Romantic Flora in Wesney. 100 respondents were selected from each neighbourhood. Due to time constraints, the results were processed as a single batch, rather than as twelve separate batches.

The survey procedure

The respondents were individually interviewed, based on a list of items in a standard questionnaire. The interviews were conducted by twelve interviewers of F. M. Marketing Consultants over a seven day period. Prior to the interviews, the respondents were given a briefing on the objectives of the study.

The questionnaire

The questionnaire consisted of four parts. Part 1 aimed to establish personal particulars of the respondents such as sex and age brackets. It comprised Questions 1 and 2. Part 2 aimed to elicit information regarding customer behaviour such as purchase frequency, preferred retail outlets, preferred occasions for purchase, as well as preferences for flowers and floral arrangements. It comprised Questions 3 to 7.

Part 3 related to pricing. It aimed to find out the most preferred retail price range for flowers. It was presented by Question 8. Part 4 aimed to establish essential services that consumers expected. These included delivery service and membership of Friends of Romantic Flora which offered discounts and special services. It comprised Questions 9 to 12. A copy of the questionnaire is provided in Appendix A.

The questionnaire consisted of two types of questions. The first required respondents to choose a single item from two or more options. Ten of the twelve questions in the questionnaire belonged to this category. Four of these questions provided two options, two provided four options, two provided five options and the two remaining ones provided six options. With these questions, if the first option was selected, the answer was coded as “1”. If the second option was selected, the answer was coded as “2”, etc. Therefore, a selection of the sixth option in one of these questions w ould entail the answer being coded as “6”.

The second type of question required respondents to select one or more options from a given list. Questions 5 and 6 belonged to this category. Question 5 comprised nine options while Question 6 comprised seven. Each of these options was treated as a single item in the encoding process. A selected option was coded as “1” while an unselected one was coded as “0”. Throughout, blank and non-responses were treated as “missing cases” and were coded as“9”. Although there were twelve questions, according to the encoding method described above, there was a total of 26 items. Items 01, 02, 03 and 04 represented Questions 1,2, 3 and 4 respectively. Items 05 to 13 represented the nine options in Question 5. Items 14 to 20 represented the seven options in Question 6. Items 21 to 26 represented Questions 7 to 12 respectively.

Results and Discussion: