Consumer Preference Analysis
of three brands of anti-aging foundations
Methodology
Structure
There are four main sections in the survey.
The first section asks questions related to the study and allows the respondent to grow familiar with the questionnaire.
The following section measures favorability change after ad exposure on pre-post constant sum scale. The respondents are asked to indicate favorability for all three anti-aging foundation brands by dividing 10 points according to their liking toward each brand. Then, three anti-aging foundation print ads were presented. The respondents were asked again to indicate brand preference for each brand in the same manner as described above.
The third section determines respondents' attitudes toward the three brands and advertisements. Ten Likert items were used to assess attributes pertaining to each individual anti-aging foundation brand. The Likert items gave the respondents an option to categorize how they felt about each brand. Each Likert item was provided a value from 1-5, labled from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Respondents' attitudes toward each ad were also measured in this section.
The respondents' demographic information was collected in the final section. The questions included gender, age, educational level, income, and the frequency they purchase foundations. The purpose of this section is to explain if any demographic information is related to how the respondents react to the ad. All the responses were provided anonymously and were assured to the respondent at the beginning of the questionnaire in order to protect the respondents' privacy.
Design
This research is based on a survey designed specifically to collect initial and post advertising exposure brand opinions. By subtracting pre-exposure purchase intention from post-exposure purchase intention, the constant sum scale is intended to measure the effects of advertising. In this survey, there was no control group. Every ad was seen in the same order by each participant.
Sampling
Due to time and budget constraints, this study used a non-random (convenience) sampling. People who were considered as samples were asked to complete the survey online. An email was sent to the "target audience" to request participation for this study. It was decided that a sample size of at least 60 would be decent enough for statistical analysis of this study. This sample size was considered to allow enough representation, so that if statistical significance is found, projection can be made in 85 or more samples of the 100 samples within the same population as these 60 were drawn that we would find results of the same magnitude. Out of 70 questionnaires returned, 60 were used for this study.
Data Collection
Respondents were asked to complete the questionnaire electronically. The data would be then sent to a database where it was collected. The program Cold Fusion was used to submit the data once the survey was completed. Microsoft Access was used to transfer the survey results to an electronic database. Finally, SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), was used to calculate statistics and recode data.