BOC week 6: Fixing CSN with Market Research

CSN can fix their 5% graduation rate with a little research on the students that go there. The school needs to conduct a survey to answer a hypothesis of what elements of the education the school is providing is not enough to keep students long enough to graduate. This would help the board of regents make decisions on what they could do within the school to increase their graduation rate. The fact that they have such a low graduation rate could be keeping would-be students from attending the collage in the first place. This sends a bad message about the school. They need to find out what it is that brought people to the school in the first place. The survey would have to ask about the students previous educational experiences. They also need to make sure they get enough participation in this survey and ensure that a sampling error doesn’t occur. Each student entering the collage would need to be surveyed on why they had decided to come and take classes. They would have to be asked if they currently had a job and if the classes they would be taking would be to further their career in that field or another one. They would have to also ask some demographic questions to make sure their survey reached a wide enough variety of students. The article in the LVRJ said that the class sizes are getting larger while the staff is being cut. That means classes are getting larger and the potential for learning the material and having enough one-on-one student teacher interaction is dwindling. The survey would need to ask current students if they felt they were learning enough in their classes to be worth the amount they were paying. CSN needs to find out if their current resources are being utilized to their fullest potential. The school would have to be very careful with the wording of the survey so they can get accurate responses.

BOC Week 4: Beautiful Stranger TV

The significance of Beautiful Stranger.TV, the website, is that it predicts trends before they are trends. This is kind of a way of conducting market research by seeing what people on the streets in their everyday lives are wearing or want to wear. It’s good for companies that produce clothing or accessories to look at this website because it gives them an idea of what the public likes to wear. It’s only a bad representation because it’s only in major cities. It doesn’t provide a clear look at the entire population and if you are a company, you want to market to more than just that city more than likely. It’s a creative, innovative way of seeing what people are buying and what they think of trends. The video section of the website offers a unique view point from professionals, mostly in the fashion industry. This is great for normal people to go on this site and be able to see what trends the professionals are agreeing with as long term and will give them an idea of which trends to buy into and which ones to let pass by. The blog is also a good source of information and even tells viewers where they can get some of the trends on sale. It’s a forum for advertisement that clothing companies and designers can easily use to reach potential customers.

Week 2 BOC: Quiz

1. What is a booty pop, and what is its significance? Booty Pop is a shaping panty for women designed to give them the appearance of having more butt than they actually do. It is supposed to give the “bubble butt” appearance. The significance of Booty Pop is that they are not a new product. Butt enhancing underwear have been around for years, however they have never been sold via infomercial. (http://consumerist.com/2010/01/booty-pop-like-a-push-up-bra-for-your-butt.html)

2. Who spends more $ online, men or women? Proportion? (%, $) Women spend 58% of the commerce dollars online. In February 2010 12.5 % of women made online purchases as opposed to 9.3% of men. (http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/shocking-news-women-spend-more-time-than-men-online-shopping/) A recent PayPal report states that men in the UK states on average have spent 672 Euros more online than women over the past 6 months. It also says that 12.9 million men shop online compared to 10.3 million women. Over the past 6 months men spend 2,602 Euros online compared to women spending 1,930 Euros online.

3. Who spends more time online, men or women? Women spend an average of 1.2 hours per week shopping online. -- More than half (52%) of the time devoted to shopping for non-grocery items in a typical week is online. (http://www.girlsandthecity.com/articles/article.asp?id=223)

4. What advantage do marketers have for women shopping online than men? Marketers have an advantage when appealing to women because women control more than 85% of the spending done in America. That means that more women are paying attention to marketing than men since they are the ones doing the shopping.