5. Marketing plan
5.2. Target consumer analysis
only charged once. They always think they can leave it and come back to check it out some other time which is not something we wish to happen to our customers. As mentioned in the introduction, the author wishes to use this system to enhance self-accountability in the customers. She knows that every tool has its limitations. Only when people are aware that their health is in their control will it become sustainable. Therefore, we have adapted our pricing to an annual fee pricing scheme to get the customers engaged in the process.
5.2. Target consumer analysis
In order to further analyze what kind of consumer would be interested in this product, we made a questionnaire (see appendix) and spread it via internet through social networks.
The questionnaire was designed to allow the measurement of the purchase intention of the respondents; for this purpose two of the questions were especially relevant (1) Which of the four functions would respondents most likely need (allowing picking more than one) and (2) whether respondents would rather download the free version, the paid version, or none of them.
With base on the previous questions we categorized the respondents as follows Table 5: The Category of respondents to the survey
Category Definition Number of
respondents
Percentage
D Want to download paid version 24 21%
C Want to download free version, and also claimed they need either "My nutritionist" or "Result analyzer"
60 51%
B Want to download the free version, and claimed they only need the free functions ( "IGrocery" and "Diet Planner" )
17 15%
A Do not want to download any of them. Or they claimed they want to download the free version, but were not interested in any of the functions.
16 14%
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From the definition, we can see the group of strongest purchase intent is group D, followed by C and B, the least is group A.
The purchase intent
The fact that only 21% of respondents manifested that they want to download the paid version (group D), does not surprise us. The complexity of the product made it difficult for the respondents to understand how it works and the benefits it brings due to the limitations inherent to a description contained in a questioner. During further conversations with some of the respondents in which a more detailed description was allowed, it was identified that the purchase intention might be higher than the figure suggested by the questioner since people usually require some trial experience before purchasing the paid version of Apps or software of this kind.
Furthermore, those who claimed interest in downloading the free version and making regular use of either "My nutritionist" or "Result analyzer" account for 50% of the total respondents.
This group as long as is offered a satisfying user experience in the free version, might upgrade to the paid version as well.
Overall perception of the product
After querying out the responses from Group A (since that was the group which manifested no interest in the product) we built the following perception profile.
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Table 6: The result of survey
Overall liking 3.55
Price/ value 3.75
Uniqueness 3.73
Need 2.99
Compared to Similar product -Better 3.29
Believability 3.80
Intend to Recommend 3.62
(Scale from 1 to 5; 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest)
The above score tells us that people think this product is quite unique, and the value/price is reasonable, therefore they would like to recommend it to friends. The overall like score is less than that of uniqueness, which implies people think it is indeed unique, but they do not like it as much. The reason might be at the need index, which is the lowest and is close to 3, (the neutral value of the scale) meaning people do not have a strong perception of need for the product.
The explanation for this low perception of need could be found in other qualitative answers for instance; 75% of the respondents replied that there is a need of dieting either related to themselves or their family, but 60% of these respondents deal with this need by "Trying to consume beneficial food items in their daily life according to common knowledge", and 18%
of them "Are not taking any action to improve their diet"; with none of them using Apps or software for diet management. The previous results show that these respondents do not actually identify a precise need for dieting in their daily lives, this could be due to the age group to which they belong (most of them are quite young Besides the concept of using apps to manage diet is not yet widely accepted which could explain as well the low perception of need for the product.
The key demographic factor determining purchase intend
We found the most evident demographic factors are number of people in the household,
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family income, and diet needs. Average number of people in the household, average family income ranking, and percentage of respondents that claimed that themselves or their family need diet are higher in group D, followed by group C and B, lowest in group A.
The need for diet is self-explanatory, and the number of people in the household is straight forward as well -Managing the diet of an entire family is more complicated than managing our personal eating habits -the previous fact is one of the most important competitive
advantages of this product. Therefore, the more family members living together, the stronger will be the incentive for a user to purchase the product.
The household income is positively related to the purchase intention. This might have to do with the purchasing power of the household, but we believe it is more related to lifestyle factors. It is reasonable that the higher the income, the more desire for health improvement, especially for those people who used to neglect their health in order to advance their careers while they were young.
We also found that, except for group A, the higher the decision maker's age, the stronger the purchase intention is. From the above, we believe that the profile of the household that will be more interested in the product is most likely one in which the parents are around 45-60 years old, having 20-30 year old children living with them. Such parents are near their retiring age and they have achieved a certain position in their careers with sufficient income.
They are familiar with computers and internet which means that they can accept the concept of using software for diet management. And most important of all, they are more focused on health than career, which contrast with the tendencies observed in younger people.
On the other hand, we were expecting that respondents that eat out more often would be less interested in this product, because it is commonly believed that cooking at home is better for health due to better control on the ingredients being used. However, we find surprising that
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the percentage of eating out is almost the same across the four groups. This might imply that people choose to eat out or cook at home because of objective living conditions, but their health consciousness and how do they wish to manage their diet is not related to their eating out habits.
Finally, because the survey was conducted between the author's friends, we believe the sample is biased. First of all, it is spread out through Facebook, meaning that all of the respondents are Facebook users. Secondly, we noticed three figures from the final results which show that the sampling base is more prone to young, technology savvy, highly educated people. (1) The smart phone/tablet users in the Decision maker is 66% of the total respondents, which is higher from the Taiwan average 30%10 (2) The percentage of
respondents that claimed to have purchased food items through the internet in the last year is 29%, which is also higher than the data of 11% 11 (3) The average people in the household is 2.59, lower than the Taiwan average of 3 ((data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics)
From the above, we believe the sampling group is not neutral, and might include relatively less respondents with the demographic characteristics that we have identified as our target market. Thus, we believe in the universe of Taiwanese consumers, the real percentage of people belonging to group D --- those who want to purchase the paid version---should be higher than 21% if the survey were conducted with enough resources to allow for a statically precise study, study which exceed the scope of IMBA business plan thesis.