Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

"...Do a project..." isn't enough information on which to base a real research project. What is it you want to know about i-ball vs. micromax mobile phones? What are you trying to learn about them? What might someone do with the results?

Until you understand that, it's absolutely impossible to determine whether a survey is the most appropriate kind of research, or what kinds of questions you might want to ask.

Good research starts with having a clear objective in mind. What important question are you trying to answer. If you don't understand the objective clearly, then there's no way to determine what the questionnaire should be asking.

Separate issue: Who are the target respondents? Where/how will you find them? This can also affect the questions you ask.

This is a student homework question, not a research/ metrics question.

Comparing brands is altogether a different beast to comparing products and services within a category (which in reality, is what you are being asked to do) and this, as a basic point of marketing educational awareness, is something your tutor ought to understand—AND—more importantly, it's something they ought to be able to clearly communicate to you.

Category = telecommunication
Niche = mobile telephones
Supplier 1. = i-ball mobile phone
Supplier 2. = micromax mobile phone

The brand of each is how their use makes people feel.

Let's take the category of computers:

The brand of supplier 1 = echoes Dell
The brand of supplier 2 = echoes Apple

They BOTH operate in the category of personal computers, but their emotional value and their first impressions are very different.

Brand impressions take mere seconds to create but for most people that's long enough to form a gut impression about the feeling of fulfillment that each brand offers.

There is a major difference between category analysis and brand impression and awareness. The two things are not the same.

Branding is what happens in people's heads. Branding has NOTHING to do with products, goods, services, and so on. Branding is about emotions and feelings. Any MBA instructor or tutor ought to know this and ought to be able to communicate it.

To review the differences in brands you need to ask people how the use of the products makes them feel, how ownership of the devices makes them feel, makes them look, and makes them seem to other people.

Does their use of THAT brand communicate something about THEM to other people? Does one brand make the user look and appear cooler, younger, more business savvy, better connected, more in tune with "the now", and does their use of those networks impact their lives, and if so, how and to what degree?

On a more mundane, category level, the questions are more basic and feature related: how do the services vary on price, on benefits, on calling plans, on phone styles, on phone costs, on coverage, on customer service, on guarantees?

These are the mechanics of the service and they reinforce the brand, but they are NOT the brand.