Figuring Out Buyer Behavior, No. 2

Segment:

As I was home for spring break, I got to widen my range of interviews. I live right around the corner from Florida Gulf Coast University, and since my sister is a student there, I thought it would be great to interview some individuals, outside of UF, that attended that university. The segment that I chose for my last assignment was students who bike around campus, so it was perfect for my trip to FGCU. All three students were undergraduate students at FGCU who seemed to not fear for their safety as much as I have heard from UF students, which I thought was very interesting. 

Interviews/ What I learned:

From my previous interviews, I had been told that when bikers purchase items to increase their safety, they usually include knee pads, elbow pads, helmets, light accessories and much more. My newer interviewees all agreed that this was a good list of items that they would consider buying if they were looking to increase their safety while biking. One of my interviewees claimed that price was more important than quality and style to him, and my other two interviewees claimed that both quality and style mattered more than the price. One mentioned that the reason that he focuses more on the quality and style rather than the price of many items is because his college is free and he has lots of money to spend elsewhere. At the time, I thought this was TMI, but it ended up giving me a better understanding of where his head was at when picking alternatives to my product. 

All three interviewees answered with Target when asked where they would most likely go first for these safety alternatives. They all agreed that this was because it was the closest store to campus and they didn’t have to question if it had the items they were looking for. One decided to add that “Target has everything,” which I thought was interesting because they don’t have my product! ;) I asked the interviewees how they thought that they would purchase the product and they all said that depending on the day, they would use cash or a debit/credit card. This question was not very specific in helping me towards learning about my product because at a place like Target, many forms of payment are used. 

When thinking back on their purchases, my interviewees gave slightly different answers regarding post-purchase evaluation. The one interviewee that claimed that the price was more important than quality and style made it apparent that he bases his ‘rightness’ of a purchase on his personal use. He said that he will analyze over time how much he used the product and will decide if the product was worth buying, or spending the money on. It makes sense that he answered this way due to his priority being the price of the object. I would assume that he cares more about what every one of his dollars are spent on in comparison with the other interviewees. The other two interviewees claimed that they base their ‘rightness’ of a purchase on the product’s life span. This makes total sense to me because when purchasing, they are more worried about the quality of an item. If they buy a product that they think is great quality and it breaks within a month, they would see their purchase as a bad idea.

Conclusion:

I think that all of the information that I received from these interviews made perfect sense. People will always look at products differently and it was interesting to see how some look for the best price and some look for the best quality or style. I am taking all of this into account when pricing, designing, and finalizing my product idea. I think it would be important to make the product as affordable as possible, but also be able to have a high profit margin, if this product were being made. I am glad that I chose this segment originally because it let me analyze feelings of students on both UF campus and FGCU campus.