Brief
Stance hired us to build a National Survey for two main purposes.
- To figure out Stances National Exposure after a recent sponsorship of athletes.
- Then, they wanted us to analyze our findings specifically down to 5 metropolitan areas and submit a proposal for the best location for Stance to put a brick and Mortar store to move their awareness east.
This was to be found out through a statistical analysis of the survey results and careful monitoring of their social media accounts and mentions.
- “One can never have enough socks.”- Albus Dumbledore
The Survey
We built a qualtrics survey and sent it out nationwide to around 2000 people. We made sure that a certain portion of the results would come from our 5 target cities: Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and Washington DC. This was a cool experience because I was able to be on the phone when we ordered the survey.
We used some qualifying questions and fake companies to root out inaccurate survey results and found their national exposure. Then we tested the 5 cities to see if any city had more awareness of Stance. We found that the awareness was even across the nation and that none of these cities had a significant advantage in their awareness of the brand.
So then we built a customer profile based on the other questions from the survey that were focused on getting to know the user. We found that if you bought Stance products, you were significantly more likely to also like outdoor hobbies like camping, hiking, and water sports.
Understanding this, we also found that citizens in Denver were more likely to enjoy these activities than any other city we tested. Therefore, we recommended Denver as the next location for their store.
Social Media
This proposal was enhanced by the research we did through social media marketing using a software called Crimson Hexagon. On Crimson Hexagon, we found that social media conversations in Denver about Stance also tended to be positive. We also noticed a correlation between stance and outdoor activities in Denver as well.
Another positive note was that the athlete they sponsored in Denver was specifically mentioned on several tweets in connection with Stance socks. This meant that the athlete they sponsored in Denver was getting them the exposure they needed.
This added some weight to our proposal to use Denver as their next store location.
- “If a picture is worth 1000 words,
a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.”– Tom & David Kelley, Creative Brothers at IDEO
My Role
This project was really fun because I was able to play a key role in the research for this client. I was part of the three-person team that wrote the survey, including all the qualifying questions and logic. Then, I wrote the boolean logic that dictated what data to pull from the social media monitoring software.Then I ran all of the functions in SPSS to test the significance of our findings with the help of one other classmate. The two of us also wrote up all of the final project text for the book we delivered to Stance.
What I learned
This project was a huge learning experience for me as I learned I really love user research. Creating the survey was very challenging because crafting the appropriate questions can be very hard. The best practice is to make sure that the questions have a purpose or a specific piece of information that you are trying to gain from each question.
Also, it was interesting to see the ability researchers have to peer into the consumer’s mind through all of the different tools we used. I learned that user research can go very deep into each purchasing decision the user might make. Most of the interactions with a brand or company can be understood based on the insights we gleaned from these tools. Whether they use our recommendations or not, it was cool to see how a company might make business decisions based on the research they perform.
