Marketing Research Proposal - Myer Improving in-Store Sales

Research proposal

Executive summary

This report identifies Myer’s management decision problem to be ‘How should Myer use social media to improve in-store sales?’ The market research problem derived is ‘What impact will social media strategies implemented by Myer have on the behaviour of their consumer market?’

This research will target all segments of Myer’s market that regularly use social media to form information about all relevant market segments, thus allowing for market-wide decisions to be made. Simple random sampling using various social media platforms will be used for a sample size of 2,000, to ensure there are enough respondents to generate necessary data. Information gathered will include demographic/profiling information, behaviour and attitude information regarding Myer and social media.

The overall cost for the research would be relatively low as online surveys are fairly inexpensive and by using random sampling on Myer’s social media platforms would result in no cost at all.

Research Problem

There are a number of factors that have created a management decision problem for Myer.

Firstly, it is recognisable that social factors have an influence on consumer purchase behaviour (Legwinski, 2012). With the increasing popularity of social media as a means of businesses communication with their market (Osatuyi, 2013) there are more opportunities for businesses to be a social influence on buyer behaviour.

The implications of this are that Myer needs to embrace social media. Megan Foster, Myer Group General Manager of Marketing & Brand Development explains that resources allocated to print media are to be re-allocated to social media (Speedy, 2011). This means Myer faces the problem of what to do with these resources to promote sales. Myer has a team of 20 dedicated to digital strategy, which has focussed on integrating social media strategies with more traditional strategies and faces challenges regarding the direction...