survey

Section: ___K3_____

Group #: ___9___

Names of students in a group: Yue Xing, Xiao Zhang, Yingcong (Ken) Yu, Zheyu Song

Focus Group Assignment
Marketing Research

Logistics:

1. Briefly describe your current group project topic.
Our goal is to help WeWork recover market share and increase profitability through targeting a new segment (college students). Similar to freelancers and solopreneurs, students need independent and comfortable spaces to enhance their study experience. WeWork can provide such a comfortable and quiet environment for students to study more efficiently. In our group project, we will try to research whether WeWork should launch “student cards” aimed at college students to capture more market share and gain profits.

2. What is your overall objective for this focus group (i.e., what do you hope to learn)?
Through the establishment of a focus group, we hope to learn whether students are interested in studying at WeWork. We hope to understand what their requirements are through in-depth communication with the target audience (college students). What types of services will they choose? What is an affordable price range for them? We can help WeWork to develop specific project plans and marketing strategies by exploring the students’ needs in-depth.

3. In general, who is your target audience for this focus group?
Our target audience is college students in the United States because many of them are looking for a comfortable and quiet place to study and finish their group projects. WeWork will be a great choice for them, especially during the pandemic since many students do not want to go to a library.
Although universities have already provided students with lots of study spaces such as libraries, many students do not want to choose them because they are too crowded and noisy. WeWork is a good choice for them because WeWork has a comfortable space and environment and can provide students with a more quiet and private environment.

4. How many focus groups do you plan to hold?
In this research project, we are planning to hold at least two focus groups, and we will modify the number of focus groups as we work through the project and make changes depending on the situation.

In the first focus group, we may ask some general questions l, which are mainly to help us understand our target group. In the following focus groups, we will ask more specific questions and obtain some information we have obtained before.

5. When and where will you hold these focus groups?
When: We will hold these focus groups in February 20, 2022
Where: We are considering Baltimore as the location to hold these focus groups because it is easy for us to conduct the experiments there, and there are no similar products or competitors in Baltimore. We will also consider holding one focus group online to collect more data.

6. Approximately how many people do you plan to invite to each focus group?
Initially, we are planning to invite 5-10 participants to each focus group. After we receive the result, we will make some improvements to the next focus group, which will also contain 5-10 participants. Also, we are planning to do a survey for a sample size of 200 people and ask them about their preferred working locations to get an insight into our research topic.

7. Where and how will you recruit participants?
The participants we select need to be representative of our target group. We need to consider the diversity of these participants as much as possible. Our goal is to attract college students to choose WeWork, so our target group is the students around us. We can choose online or offline modes to conduct the focus groups. The advantage of the offline mode is that we can understand the participants’ attitudes towards the questions we ask through face-to-face communication more clearly. The advantage of the online mode is that we can include more participants in more regions. In terms of investigation, we will use Qualtrics to make questionnaires. The advantage of an online questionnaire is that we can get more people from different areas to help us fill it out, which can ensure the diversity of sample size. For the recruitment of activities, we will publish on social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and the class discussion board. Simultaneously, we can communicate with our classmates directly and allow them to participate in our focus group.

8. Will you compensate your focus group participants? If so, how?
Compensation will help more people to actively participate in our focus group. Compensation is also our way of thanking the participants in our study. For example, we can provide a Starbucks gift card to the participants as compensation.

Discussion Questions:

Given your overall objective (from Question 1), come up with two specific discussion topics related to that goal. Then, for each topic, develop a list of at least 5 questions you would like to ask focus group participants about that topic.

Topic 1: Investigation of the students’ requirements from a study space
Describe your current study space and your satisfaction level with it.
What are you looking for in an ideal study space as a student?
What is an estimated price you are willing to pay for access to such a study space?
What would be an ideal location for the study space (for example, how close does it have to be to your student accommodation or university?)
Are you concerned about the safety measures, like social distancing, for the Covid-19 pandemic in libraries? Would you prefer to be able to access individual meeting spaces for safety?

Topic 2: What features of WeWork can be useful to students?
We will briefly describe the company WeWork before asking this question) Have you heard of We Work previously? Would you consider this to be a space that can benefit students?
If We Work launches “student cards” with special features for students are you likely to avail of such an offer? Elaborate.
What features would you like to see available on the WeWork student card? For example, do you want the student card to be one month, one semester, or one year?
How many days a week are you likely to access such a study space by We Work?
What, if anything, would discourage you from accessing such a study space?

Next Steps:

What are some limitations of focus groups?
Given that we are trying to evaluate whether WeWork should launch student services nationwide, the size of our focus groups will limit the diversity of our focus groups and hence make our results less reliable. Even if both focus groups will have 10 people and each of them comes from a unique state, there will only be 20 different states, which is way fewer than the 50 states in the United States.
Another limitation of our focus groups is that our participants may lack knowledge about WeWork, caused by their identities – student. WeWork is mainly targeting companies or individuals who regard WeWork as a workspace instead of students, so there are only a few students who have worked or learned about details of WeWork and its services by interning or visiting companies or individuals who work in WeWork’s workspace. This can lead to biased answers and perceptions.

Given these limitations, how would you use the results of the focus group to inform the next stages of your project?
Regarding the diversity limitation, we can strengthen the credibility of our results by including survey results as assistance and ensuring the diversity of our survey audience. For the limitation of not knowing well about WeWork, we can provide detailed explanations every time before focus group discussions to let participants have a brief understanding of what WeWork is and how its services work. Although these two methods can reduce the subjectivity of our results, we will still be biased if our conclusion still talks about whether WeWork should launch student services on the scale of the entire county. Therefore, we can adjust our outcomes to certain areas or cities based on details of the focus groups we invited and the survey results we collected.