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APPROACH

 

OBJECTIVES

The underlying reasons for the market research that the Manolo Blahnik Consulting Team 10 is going to conduct are the following:

• We want to assess if there is a potential market for Manolo Blahnik shoes in Shanghai;

• We want to get close to our potential customer and need to understand how they feel and think about our shoes;

• We need to find out if potential customers find the marketing mix of Manolo Blahnik appealing;

• We want to know if there is a way to improve our value proposition for the Chinese customers.

 

 

METHODOLOGY

We plan to conduct a combined qualitative and quantitative survey with current and potential customers. This will result in useful insights into the Chinese target market through collecting primary data. Besides collecting primary data we will also collect secondary data from reliable internet sources.

Collecting primary data:

 

• Target population - In the survey we are targeting women buying luxury shoes in the age of 20 to 60 in order to expand our global target customers (24-55) in order to gain broader insights.
   

• Sample size - With the underlying formula we can calculate the optimal sampling size. Assuming the people that will be asked as interviewees are normal distributed among their spending behaviour in luxury shoes we can calculate an optimal sample size of 62 (61,26 exactly). We chose a confidence interval of 90% and a margin of error of 10%. Furthermore, we take into consideration that about 30% of the approached people will not be willing to participate the in the survey.
   

• Sampling procedure - In order to reach out to the sampling frame we will conduct the survey in different locations in Shanghai. The locations will be chosen by the biggest clusters of luxury stores, and wealthy appealing women will be randomly invited to participate in our face to face survey, which is questionnaire assisted.

 

 

INSTRUMENTS

Our survey will include a focus group with women buying shoes in the luxury segment and individual interviews with Manolo Blahnik buyers. That enables us to collect qualitative data in order to gain knowledge about how the customers think about our product and about the buying behaviour of those women.

 

In addition, to the mentioned tools we will use visualisation techniques in our research by showing the attendees pictures of Manolo Blahnik shoes and asking them what thoughts, feelings, and emotions these evoke.

 

After we gained those important insights we will base the questionnaire on the feelings and habits of our current and potential customers to create tailored questions for our quantitative research.

 

Interviewees will answer the questionnaire face to face with an interviewer on shopping streets and in shopping malls, targeting an audience in the luxury segment.