There was a huge amount of information to be found in academic journals and reports about Starbucks and coffee shops in general. It was difficult sifting through and finding things that could be used to help prove or disprove our hypothesis. In the end the information I focused on was a Keynote Market Report 2014, on coffee and sandwich shops, and a report called Starbucks Exceptionalism: An Institutional Ethnographic Exploration of Coffee Culture in America from the Journal of Psychological Issues in Organisational Culture.
I considered what the agenda's of these two publications would be, and who was consulted for the purpose of the surveys - what ages, socio-economic groups, nationalities, etc, and whether they were already Starbucks customers.
I printed out both reports, and highlighted facts which I considered were relevant to confirming or contradict our hypothesis that Starbucks is so successful because its coffee has become a status symbol. Next I went through and summarised my findings with bullet points.
I also asked as many friends, family and colleagues as I could, the questions in the survey that Seb and myself had put together, and got 12 completed responses. I also asked a very quick 2 question survey on Facebook: describe Starbucks, and describe a Starbucks customer. I got 15 responses. The difficulties with both of these are friends and family are likely to share viewpoints, be from the same socio economic group and the research could be very skewed. With asking people for 2 words, you get a very generalised view of their opinions, and some people respond with what they consider to be "funny" responses!
Seb and Connor are working on their respective areas, so I decided to start putting the slides together, so that on Thursday we can confirm our presentation.
No comments:
Post a Comment