New amazing car market a quarter later
This article is the fulfillment of an obligation to all people who took part in the marketing research of MBA students of the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University. The research was part of a student project as part of a strategic marketing assignment, meaning it was not commercial. The only thing we could offer the participants was to share the results with them. That is why you are reading this article.
And here is the first result for you: every fourth participant asked to send him what he got. As a thank you, I am writing this article. If you are not interested in ready-made conclusions, you can immediately open the link to raw data (everything except email addresses). If you see something interesting in the data, write in the comments.
If you are interested not only in data, but also in conclusions, I ask under cat. I will tell you why and how the study was conducted, I will reveal a couple of serkets that I learned on the course and, of course, I will show the interpretation of the results.
Why car market?
Any market and company could be chosen as the final project. Someone chose well-established markets, transparent and stable – yes, there are still such. But the author of these lines was driven by a thirst for change. This is an MBA, that is, about business. And in what market can you make money: where everything has long been divided or is experiencing a storm? A rhetorical question.
Over the past few years, the domestic automotive market has turned upside down several times. It was destroyed to the ground, rose from the ashes and, it seems, even began to slowly recover. And I decided to figure out what is happening on it. In addition, the author of these lines is an experienced motorist and is partly personally interested in the result.
The objective of the whole project, what was assessed in the course, was not only market research, but the proposal of a marketing strategy for one brand. At the same time, for the purity of the study, the brand should not be highlighted in the questionnaire. The study must be independent. Although by individual signs, if you wish, you can guess what kind of brand it was. I will not mention it further and will focus only on the study.
What are we researching?
The obvious thing we don’t think about: The market is people. Not companies, not technologies, but you and me. The teacher on the course made an important clarification: people who have the opportunity to buy. But the essence remains the same. Thus a simple question: what happens to the market is concretized: Who buys what and why? And why is the most important.
I have the first physical and mathematical education. Do I believe that the stated question about people can be given a clear numerical answer? – Of course not! Moreover, I know for sure that the error is always and everywhere, it’s just that in marketing it is higher than in physics. And they reduce it in the same way – by increasing the number of measurements or, in our case, questionnaires.
And this allows you to further specify the task: to collect a questionnaire and persuade as many people as possible to fill it out.
What is a questionnaire?
For those who did not participate in the original study, I publish a link to the questionnaire https://forms.gle/WsSuaajGUMBo34NbA
You can contribute. If something new turns up after the publication of the data, I promise to share it. If you think to fill it out, please do so before reading the rest of the article – its content may influence your answers.
When compiling the questionnaire, I had to choose the optimum from two opposing qualities: Too short a questionnaire would not allow us to draw at least some constructive conclusions. On the other hand, fewer people will fill out a questionnaire that is too voluminous. As a result, there were 14 questions, of which only two were mandatory. All questions except the last one are closed, that is, they require a simple choice from several points. As a result, the claimed filling time of 2 minutes is even too high.
The most not obvious moments for me were:
Prohibition on direct request for personal data. The only place in the questionnaire where you could enter an email address was optional and note that the words email or e-mail do not appear in the questionnaire. This would have scared off some of the respondents.
The same slippery question about money. It is very important to find out how much the respondent earns and, accordingly, how much he is willing to spend, but a direct question is taboo. Perhaps because the answers to it will be inflated. Instead of a direct question in the questionnaire there is a phrase: “What do you think is a fair price for a new car?» Feel the difference? You won’t lie when it comes to justice, will you? And yes, people respond differently.
Well, and some simpler things: no need to shrink and offer ten answers where you can group them into 5.
To summarize everything in one sentence, the questionnaire should be restrained. This is of interest.
A separate item is the question of important features. Why are they like this, why in this order? This is where my mini-study was done. The top sales for February were taken from the autostat, the 10 most popular models were selected and all the reviews on the drome were checked for them. What do people write about? The features of the cars mentioned most often, no matter in a negative or positive way, are chosen as basic. And it is precisely by the number of references.
The author allowed himself to deviate from this rule only for the last point: security. The original study showed that in tenth place was the trunk and everything connected with it. It angered me! It turned out to be in vain – security is simply important to everyone and the selection on it turned out to be practically useless.
Similarly, car brands were taken from the data on autostat sales leaders for the question of what kind of car the respondent owns.
Where are the respondents from?
Oh, this is the hardest part. Friends-acquaintances, colleagues, teammates and forums. At the same time, about a dozen times I had to answer that: “No, we do not pay money to respondents and we will not profit from the results. This is student research… On some forums, the call to participate was banned and had to be written off with the administration. Somewhere we managed to reach an agreement, somewhere we didn’t.
The author also wrote to all the bloggers mentioned in the study. Alas, no one responded to the call to help with the respondents, although one person asked to send him the results. Apparently letters to bloggers are a separate genre in which the author has not become proficient.
In total, at the time of the project completion, about 180 people took part in the study. This is above the requirements for work and the psychological threshold, but below the level of pride. And from that moment on, the main challenge was: is it possible to get something useful on the basis of such a modest sample?
Reliability of results
The essence of the reliability of the results is equal to the reliability of the sample. How well do our respondents model the entire market? We can evaluate the quality of the sample through several indicators, the values of which are known to us for the market. Read measured by someone more representative.
Data purity. There is always someone who got into the sample by chance. Some will call them outcasts, others pedestrians. We thank them for their participation, but alas, their voices are not relevant to us. There were 27 such people or 15.2%. We will exclude them from consideration and thus we have 155 questionnaires left. And here we have the first test indicator. What is the “normal” proportion of outcasts in a group? According to my data, just 15%. Converging!
The simplest metric by which to assess the correctness of the sample is the distribution between men and women. We know how many men and how many women we have. Of course, in the car market, the proportion should be expected to be shifted, but it is suitable for evaluation. We got 25% women. The share of female drivers in Russia, according to Google, is 20%. Close, which also speaks in favor of the sample.
The last indicator is needed purely automotive. And we will evaluate the internal consistency of the data. All market leaders today, a year ago, could only dream of it. Except for the car of course. By the share of such brands among the respondents, we can judge, although we did not ask about it: what proportion of the respondents updated their cars in the last year. On the other hand, in the sample there was a question about a reasonable, in the opinion of the respondent, frequency of changing a car. The share of new brands is ~3%, this number should be compared with the average car ownership period of 5 years. Watch your hands: Leapfrog in the market lasts a year; During this time, 20% should have been updated. If we had a higher share of new brands, there would be an oblique sample of convinced sinologists. Everything is fine with us, we continue to study.
However, it was not without flaws either. The age characteristic correlates much better with the age of the author of the study than with the real position in the market. Most likely, this was determined by the circle of communication and, accordingly, the search for respondents.
Interpretation of results
The backbone of the entire sample is actually three responses:
Are you part of the market
What do you want from a car
What do you already have that you want?
This allows you to evaluate things like need and satisfaction. That is, to actually understand: where the market has not finalized and what needs of the market are not satisfied today, which means they will be satisfied tomorrow.
Actually, this entire multi-line opus can be cut down to one picture.
This is where we hit the sampling limit. In fact, all of our features lined up in a row. And this is not surprising, the market is large, complex with a large number of participants. Not surprisingly, all needs are covered. Any outliers are immediately compensated.
Everyone can find a product for their needs in the automotive market, even now.
Rather like this: deviations from this straight line are so small that the error of our sample does not allow us to reliably identify them.
Another analysis method is to evaluate the positive and negative correlation between different features and then segment the audience. Let me explain with an example:
In the picture, your “least diagonal” is a comparison of the desired cross-country ability – the desired number of options. Suppose that our respondents and the entire market they model are divided into three groups:
Those for whom cross-country ability is more important than the number of options
Those for whom options are more important than cross-country ability
Those for whom these features are equivalent
Let’s call the first “jeepers”, the second “hipsters”:
We get that jeepers are more demanding in terms of internal convenience (ergonomics) and reliability, while they are ready to sacrifice their appearance. Hipsters, on the contrary, crave a beautiful appearance, but at the same time they are ready to sacrifice ergonomics and reliability – you see, for whom most modern cars are made?
Don’t like heuristics? – Me too
You can always do better. Let’s not evaluate the segments “by eye”, but use the clustering algorithm. Let’s take the k-mean algorithm and ask it to scatter the respondents based on their desires.
conclusions
Even if it seems to us that the car market is going wild, it is actually a complex system that responds to market demands. Even a small sample shows that “new brands” are doing everything right. Problems with ergonomics, no cross-country ability, but a cool exterior and many many options. People, you yourself want it! Disagree – write in the comments.
