Trial Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yB50kW6CR6cHMxOOwMFWwYUA79ty_JZ0mqpttcAB-zw/edit
Final Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CSq8eyVPB3ClZGQOoGsxxXEOIEIBA0f1lupPSIu8Jyk/edit#responses
The main interest of our group was over youngsters being Influenced by Key Opinion Leaders, in terms of purchasing products/services, body image/self-esteem, and plastic surgery. To be regarded as an opinion leader, one must be knowledgeable or competent in the area in which his or her leadership is sought. It is seldom that attention is paid to the opinions of people. Who lack the qualities (Severin & Tankard, 1979). Others can have an influence on the consumer’s decision-making process such as friends, relatives and there are occurrences that influence the consumers’ acceptance.
Through this research, we hope to find out who are the people influencing the young people on their purchasing behaviour, body image and them going under the knife. Are they Celebrities? Idols? or are they the people who are surrounded by them on daily basis, such as Friends or Family?
Our Questionnaire has Likert Scales, matrix, open-ended and close-ended question to examine respondents’ behaviour and attitude. A lot of rating type questions are used to survey the frequency of respondents’ behaviour and attitude, thereby reflecting on how deep they are into the social media and the opinion leaders on social media (influencers). It can help us in doing an in-depth research.
It was hectic improving our questionnaire, we did a trial with 4 people before we actually share it to the public. By doing the trial we realised how difficult and inconvenient it was to do the survey, since we have not given assurance by saying that it’s going to be kept confidential, we have not well-explained or given any example of who “KOLs” – Key Opinion Leaders are. Other than that we also had issues with our question arrangement and question types, the positioning of the questions was random. Therefore, the questions seem like they were being repeated and was hard to follow. There were many open-ended questions discouraging respondents to finish the survey seriously as it takes time to process the questions. So for our final survey, we have improved the questionnaire based on the criticism and added in topic of research, cut down open ended questions unless necessary, positioned the questions according to types like “behavioural”, “attitude” and “general questions”. Most importantly we assured the respondents safety/confidentiality.
Key statistical findings:
Figure 1:
According to Figure 1 data, 38% and 26% of the respondents said that their friends and family influences them the most on their purchases respectively. It’s clearly shown that celebrities and personal idols do matter but family and friends are more influential in terms of what they purchase.
Figure 2:
Let’s look at the response on “somewhat agree” and “Strongly agree”, well from the data found, we can see that 35% of the respondent said they “somewhat agree” that KOLs interest turns into their interest. 31% of the respondents said that they want to be KOL one day, another 31% said they buy products which KOLs introduce and another 31% said they do go to places where the KOLs introduce such as restaurant. This data clearly shows that the survey respondents did get affected/influenced because of KOLs regarding their purchases, interest and goals of life.
Data that we found through our questionnaire is quite useful, definitely if we had more respondents and more time we would have gotten larger number to conclude our findings but with the small amount of respondents, the response was what we were looking forward to, as before we have already read qualitative and quantitative researches from other people regarding our interest of topic, and have written it on our annotated Bibliography. That’s also going to help us for our individual Task. If we have the chance to do something differently, we wouldn’t restrict respondents anybody would be allowed to do the survey, and boys data and girls data should be separated so that we could compare them both easily.
Reference:
Chakravarthy, S. and Prasad, G. (2011). The Impact of Opinion Leader on Consumer Decision Making Process. 1st ed. [ebook] India. Available at: http://www.ijmbs.com/13/gvbhawani.pdf
Focus Group: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5lmVbM3mU&feature=youtu.be
Part 2: Individual Submission (800 words)
KHAN SULTANA NAZISH: https://nazblogg.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/individual-comparative-analysis/
NORA https://noraweekly.wordpress.com/
EDEN: https://eden6984.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/829/
Nazish.blog 