Market Research Project - Caddyhome

1. Executive summary

The purpose of this research report is to find out whether customers are interested in an online hypermarket. To analyze this, the research is divided in three topics. The first one discusses the interest from customers to buy online. The second looks at drivers and barriers for people to buy online. Finally, the third topic investigates the different product categories that Caddyhome should include in their assortment. To analyze these topics, a market research was conducted through a face to face questionnaire and the results analyzed through a statistical program called SPSS. These results can be found in Appendix A. On the basis of these results, recommendations are given to Caddyhome regarding these topics.

2. Introduction

Caddyhome is the home delivery service of the Delhaize Group which is active in 7 countries across 3 continents. For years, they have focused on the selling of grocery products. Caddyhome is now thinking of extending their product assortment to become an online hypermarket. With this hypermarket, Caddyhome tries to offer customers the possibility to satisfy all of the weekly shopping needs in one click. This market research focuses on a few topics. First, it focuses on the interest of people to buy in an online hypermarket. Further, it looks at the reasons (drivers) for being interested and the reasons for not being interested (barriers) by customers. Next, it answers the question which non-grocery products Caddyhome should include in the new product assortment. Based on statistical results, it gives recommendations to Caddyhome in terms of their product strategy. Thus, if it is worthwhile for Caddyhome to transform to an online hypermarket and which products should be included in the assortment. The main question this research project seeks to answer is: “does an online hypermarket increase customer satisfaction?”. We chose this problem statement because we believe that customer satisfaction is the clearest tool to evaluate the success of the implementation of an online hypermarket. Sales, for example, wouldn’t be a good tool because sales will increase automatically since Caddyhome offers far more new products. Profit as an evaluative tool is not good either. Profit will change so much because Caddyhome’s business will change drastically. Only after a long run, when the hypermarket is fully implemented, profit can be used to measure the success of the project. But at that time, it could be too late already for Caddyhome to find out that they are investing in a bad project. So we believe that customer satisfaction is the most direct and efficient way to measure the successfulness of the project. Included are statistical test acquired via SPSS. However, the reader should keep in mind that this project will have limitations because it is conducted with a relatively small scale sample.

3. Research design

The purpose of our study is advising Caddyhome about the decision to open an online hypermarket and what type of products they should include in this new assortment. We have decided to collect primary data because there is no data about this topic available yet. To collect this