Determining the demand for a product or service
You have been hired as a marketing consultant in your company, or a company or public service organization of your choosing. The organization is asking you to identify a sample population to determine the demand for a product or service they are planning to offer. You will need to provide an unbiased sample survey that best represents the population.
In your post,
State the organization’s industry or purpose.
Identify the product or services selected for conducting the survey.
State the problem that the product or service will solve.
Explain what the organization wants to learn about the product or services from the survey.
Explain how and where you determined your sample population and why your sample choice will get you the data you need.
Determine a sample size that will adequately represent the population for your example and how you determined this is an adequate sample size in your survey.
Sample Solution
The organization I have chosen is a public service organization that provides mental health services to the community. The product or service selected for the survey is their new online counseling program, which offers mental health support through remote video chat sessions with trained therapists. The problem that this product or service will solve is access to
quality mental healthcare for those who cannot attend in-person appointments due to distance, mobility issues, or other circumstances. With this survey, we are aiming to learn more about how users feel about the convenience and effectiveness of this online counseling program so that it can be further refined and improved.
In determining our sample population for the survey, we have opted for a geographical approach in order to capture an unbiased representation of our target demographic. Our participant pool was drawn from zip codes within a 30 mile radius around our office location in order to best represent local residents who may benefit from our online counseling services. We also included additional criteria such as age range (18-65), gender identity (cisgender male/female/nonbinary), and employment status (employed full-time/part-time/unemployed) in order to ensure diversity among participants and generate results applicable across multiple demographics.
Our sample size for this survey was determined by using two different methods: one utilizing Chickering’s Rule of Thumb which states that you need at least 10 respondents per survey question; and another using Krejcie & Morgan’s table which gives estimates of adequate sample sizes based on population size and degree of accuracy desired from your study results. Based on these methods, we determined an adequate sample size for our survey would be 250 participants in order to achieve sufficient accuracy with statistical testing after collecting data from them.