Reference no: EM133198543 , Length: 3 pages.
Assignment: Fashion Marketing Paper
Your company is developing a new line of athletic apparel based on new developments in cotton finishing technology. Your job is to assess consumers' expectations and provide guidance to the design team in order to maximize the probability of success of the new product. After conducting exploratory research and learning about your marketing problem through secondary sources, you decide to investigate customer reviews of selected athletic wear products on Amazon.com, in order to answer the following questions:
1. What are the quality characteristics of athletic tops of most concern to consumers? How do these rank by importance?
2. Among those, what are the major factors that can lead to a negative review of the product?
You decide to conduct a content analysis of customer reviews posted on Amazon. You also decide to focus on recent activewear performance technologies available on the market such as Charged Cotton (by Under Armour). Proceed according to the following steps:
I. Know what you are talking about! What is charged cotton? Search for sources that explain what it is and how it works. Tip: search online for a technology named TransDry cotton and Wicking Windows.
II. Define the population for your content analysis (Body of material): search Amazon (or other online retail sites) for customer reviews relevant to charged cotton athletic tops
III. Select a sample of a minimum of 100 customer reviews. For the purposes of this exercise, select the first 100 reviews you think are relevant (we will worry about formal sampling techniques later). Copy-paste the reviews you selected in the first page of the enclosed spreadsheet and include links to the original webpages. (an example is included in the spreadsheet)
IV. Your unit of analysis: words/themes mentioned by customers related to given quality characteristics.
V. You will use the a-priory categories of content listed below
i. Durability
ii. Style/look
iii. Fit
iv. Comfort (fabric touch, softness)
v. Moisture management
vi. Price/perceived cost
vii. Material preference
viii. Odor
ix. Other
VI. Quantification system: code for frequency in the same way demonstrated with the slideshow example. (see second page of the enclosed spreadsheet)
VII. Code all reviews: Read the reviews and report the mentions that you would classify in each category. Note that one single review may mention multiple concepts and may count toward multiple categories. For example, one customer may be happy with the comfort of your product but complain about the price. That is one tally in the positive column of comfort, and another one in the negative column for price/perceived cost.