Scenario:

Swlwen Botanicals is a luxury beauty brand offering plant-based skincare products, various teas (some with medicinal properties), and other related products. Although the company offers a digital presence for direct-to-consumer online shopping, they also offer their products in select stores across Canada, including Holt Renfrew H-Product. The company is well situated to take advantage of the continually growing trend towards choosing healthy, clean cosmetics products; the global Natural and Organic Cosmetics market was valued at $29.92 billion USD in 2021 (Research and Markets, 2022). In order to continue the growth of her company, the owner is considering two possible options.

First, the owner has noted that hair product growth is centred on hair care rather than grooming, and an overall preference for naturally-sourced products (iCrowdNewsWire, 2022). Thus, one option would be to develop a set of products in this industry. The advantage of this option is that the products easily align with the overall brand and company vision, where natural ingredients intersect with medicinal and beneficial outcomes. A concern, however, is that consumers tend to be very loyal to their brands when it comes to beauty regimes, and there is no guarantee that her existing customers would be willing to transition to her hair care options, or that she could attract new customers in a somewhat crowded market.

Alternatively, another area of growth is the male market. One outcome of the Covid pandemic was a growth in the male market focusing on things like skin care products (Anyanwu, 2022). This, coupled with further growth in brands targeting specific racial groups (Mintel, 2020) offers another opportunity for the owner: to develop a product line geared directly towards men that includes recognition of different racial needs. Again, this option aligns well with the overall brand, and presents potential for growth. However, while a large, under-tapped market, it is still unclear how many men are actively looking for skin care products outside of the more traditional areas of sun protection and a preference for multi-use products.

The issue is that, presently, the owner can only focus her resources on one of the two opportunities. Therefore, she has hired you to lead a marketing research effort on her behalf, as she believes that additional information is required to determine which alternative will have the greatest longterm benefit for her business.

TASK:

1) Create 20 relevant marketing research survey or interview questions and select an appropriate method for gathering the data(survey or interview) , and provide an overall rationale for your choice of questions and the order in which you place them. And why you chose that method. Consider who you will sample with this method, and provide a brief rationale for your choice.

2) Ensure that your choice of questions follows best practices. Include any relevant details about how the data will be collected (e.g., for a survey question, what is the scale? For an interview, do you have any follow-up prompts for your question?). There is no specific formatting required for the questions (i.e., if using a survey, they do not need to look like a survey question, with radio buttons or the like).

3) Provide a rationale for your choices in questions, from an overall perspective. Why is that the most important information, given the decision to be made? If you make any particular choices for a question (e.g., phrasing one way versus another), explain that as well.