Week 5: Updates, Survey, and Focus Group

“Consumers generally purchase products with incomplete information about the alternatives” and “frequently do infer quality from price” (Smith et al., 2001, pg.34 -35)

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

First and foremost, I am excited to announce that my survey is complete! I’ve attached it at the end of my post. I’d appreciate it if everyone would take some time to complete it and even more so, any additional sharing of the link so I can reach more people!

Next, I want to talk a little about the article I read this week: “Best Value, Price-Seeking, and Price Aversion: The Impact of Information and Learning on Consumer Choices.” by Gerard J. Tellis & Gary J. Gaeth. This article explored how consumers make choices based on perceived value, pricing strategies, and their attitudes towards pricing information. The authors looked at the psychology behind consumer decision-making, considering factors such as how consumers seek out information, their reactions to different pricing strategies, and how learning influences their choices over time. I found this really beneficial to my research because it helped me better understand consumer behaviour and how that could impact how businesses develop different pricing strategies in response to demand.

This week I also had a really beneficial conversation with my on-site advisor. After talking to him, I came to the decision to not focus a lot of my energy on interviews for my data. I will still reach out to a few people to interview to gain more insight on dynamic pricing and reaffirm the findings that I already have. But, I won’t plan to use it as my primary source of data. Rather I will just focus on getting my survey out to as many people as possible and using that as I believe that the information that I will gain from that will be more beneficial to my research (which is also why I would love assistance in sharing my survey to more people!). I believe it will be more beneficial to my research because I found that a lot of the information that I was hoping to gain from interviews I have been able to gain from my own research. 

While talking to my on-site advisor, he gave me the idea to conduct a focus group. This will allow my to ask questions (some similar to those on my survey) but more in-depth and I will also hopefully be able to conduct some meaningful debates. 

I have managed to set up my first one this coming Tuesday. Because I have never conducted a focus group myself, the idea is to treat this as a trial run. I will still plan on using the data I gather from it, but because the group is on the smaller side it will allow me to make mistakes and find ways to fix them. If this one goes well I then plan to host a much larger one with a more diverse group of people. I’m really excited to go forward with this and look forward to sharing how it goes in my blog post next week!

Thank you for reading my blog post this week and please take some time to fill out the following survey!

https://forms.gle/9Bcius6KGqsuJJqf6 

For reference:

Tellis, Gerard J., and Gary J. Gaeth. “Best Value, Price-Seeking, and Price Aversion: The Impact of Information and Learning on Consumer Choices.” Journal of Marketing, vol. 54, no. 2, Apr. 1990, p. 34, https://doi.org/10.2307/1251868. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.