Hamilton Power Tools

Introduction

Hamilton Power Tools has been marketing industrial products by catering to the construction and industrial tools market for the last 55 years. One of its main products was the gasoline powered chain saw. Apart from the professional users, Hamilton was concentrating on the casual users segment as well. As the chain saw sales began to slow down in 1997, Mr Campagna and Mr. Ray Johnson, the chain saw sales manager felt the need of consumer research as a first step towards transformation of Hamilton from a sales oriented company to a consumer oriented company.

Consumer Metrics of Chicago was hired for conducting two research projects. The first was the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). In a TAT respondents are shown a series of images and are asked to express their feelings about the people in the images.

Advantages of this method are:

* Within 24 hours a person forgets 75 percent of what he learned the previous day. This method asks about things which very few consumers are likely to remember.

* The projective techniques have the ability to induce state and context elements that can improve consumer recall.

* Projective techniques will help in bringing out the responses were the consumer is not able to articulate their answers.

* In addition to providing alternatives to asking questions these techniques increases the comfort level of respondents with limited verbal skills.

* This method also reduces the respondents’’ reluctance to express themselves about sensitive topics.

* They also reduces social desirability influence on the consumer’s responses

In the TAT survey the 4 images were shown to the consumer and their responses were recorded.

Picture 1

In the first picture a man looking at a tree was shown and the consumers were asked what he was thinking about. The responses for this picture would give the basic needs of a customer. It also showed what the customers felt was an alternative to the chain saw.

Picture 2

In the...