This is the first phase of the Marketing research project. Along with the background of the problem, in this section, we have stated the Decision and Research Problem, Both of which were influenced by the environmental context of the problem.
At the beginning, the purpose was to find out if there were any setbacks of the website of Aarong. A small scale qualitative research (pilot survey) was conducted among few people who had visited Aarong’s website previously. Interestingly, finding people who had already visited Aarong’s website was a problem itself. Nevertheless, the findings were quiet enlightening.
According to the respondents, the Likeable factors of the website were its simplistic appearance, amount of information etc. Conversely, the unlikeable factors were visibility of links, errors, no price related information and so on. Though there were few likeable elements, almost all the respondents had a negative impression of the website in total. In some cases, what one respondent liked about site was disliked by another. These insights lead to the inference that, not many people knew about Aarong’s website, nor they have ever browsed it, and the site requires heavy improvement. This survey also raised one important question; will it be worthy enough to perk up the website?
After evaluating the environmental context and the findings of the qualitative research, we developed the decision and research problem by following the six steps of problem definition:
1. Aarong’s Management is the decision maker. 2. We are the marketing researcher. 3. The DM is opting for a planned change, i.e. to improve the current website of Aarong. 4. Basic options are : 1) To improve the website 2) Not to improve the website 5. Decision Problem: Should Aarong improve the overall quality of its website? 6. Research Problem: To determine whether improvements in the website will acquire greater number of users and create enhanced