Brighton Boutique is a medium sized, independent retailer in Brighton on the UK South Coast. They are a boutique style clothing outlet that champions the work of local and new designers. They are concerned that they need to undertake special promotions to encourage shoppers back to visit their shop after the challenges of the lockdowns and the pandemic. One of their aims is to create a more ‘destination shopping’ experience for their customers, but it is also of paramount importance that everyone feels safe and supported in this process.
So, the aim of Brighton Boutique is to consider how to innovate for a more interactive or engaging shopping experience to compete with the online experience that customers have become used to with online shopping in the past year. They need your agency to undertake some research to help them to come up with ideas for developing this shopping experience so that they can promote this to customers in a new campaign; it is important that not only is it addressing an innovative shopping experience, but that it addresses concerns that people may have.
The research needs to be done within 6 weeks, and within a budget of £20,000.
The management Decision Problem (MDP) has been identified as: What kind of events and/or shopping experience could Brighton Boutique provide to encourage their customers to return to the physical store?
You work for the agency and your boss has asked you to prepare a report of a research design with a qualitative research approach that you think would be suitable and why; this will then be discussed at a planning meeting. The client wants the research to be carried out within a timescale and budget, so please indicate in general that this is a consideration.
Evaluate the stages for approaching this research problem and identify the methodology and type of methods relevant to this research problem.