Hi,
Suppose that I am studying Purchase Decision of customer towards certain brand or product in a supermarket.
My question is regarding the target population to be selected as my respondent if I am collecting a primary data through questionnaire.
Is my target population will consist of any customer of the supermarket or just the supermarket customers who bought the product?
I got different views towards this matter since some says I should take all customers and some says it should be only those who bought the product.
Could you give me your point of view regarding this matter and the reason why?
This has been a common problem in marketing research projects. However, it is not difficult to address. In an ideal situation, a sampling frame would have been great, but in these situations, it is extremely difficult to have one. Therefore, most researchers go for area cluster (like malls or shop locations where potential target customers would be shopping) and then adopt systematic random sampling. Here is the real problem. How do I know that the next customer I would be approaching belongs to my target respondent group? Should I look for whether he/she is buying the brand in question, or just approach and collect the data whomsoever is available in the mall? Largely, this depends on the research question and scope of research. Am I looking for brand perception of both the users and non-users or just measuring the level of awareness no matter whether somebody is buying it or not? How about if the person is not buying the brand right now, but he/she is an avid user of the brand that he/she already has some ready stock at home? The safe guess would be to use filter questions at the beginning and use "skip logic" to subsequent questions. For example, if I just want to measure the perception of brand "users" only, I may end up surveying both the buyers and non-buyers (by observing). Then by using the data in the filter question(s), it would be possible to sort out only the "users" data because not all non-buyers (at the time of observation) are not necessarily non-users at home. Thus, the summary answer may be, it depends on how you define your research question and how the research limits or extends its scope, in my humble opinion.
- Any customer of the supermarket - Existing & Potential Customer
- Supermarket customers who bought the product - Existing Customers (New and /or Repeat)
Normally a target population is considered to be those who affect the purchase of a product normally classified on
- Buying Power
- Class of Society
- Gender etc.,
Actually, I can not say more with Ahmed Fouad, whose answer is the correct answer. In this case, you have to refer to your research objectives and determine what are you going to study, in your case, its a specific brand or product therefore you have to take the buyers and customers of this brand or product at the supermarket you are study.
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