Artefact 4 - Findings

From the focus group, the main information I gathered was; - all of the participants use their local services, however the students didn't use the village businesses as much as the others they tended to use bigger brands. The older participants would recommend by word of mouth, and the students and mum would often use twitter or facebook to share or retweet the information to their friends. Mixed view on preferring leaflets or website, the older generation prefer leaflets and they can easily hold on to them to regain information. One of the students uses websites for information for everything whilst the other enjoys looking at leaflets if creative like the 02 academy flyers but also enjoys sites such as urban outfitters for creativity. The older generation prefer leaflets because it's easy to see what you're getting and the price, however big brands such as Asda have easy navigation sites which they use to shop on-line for occasionally. All participants had some form of smartphone or tablet they use on a regular basis. Talking to the participants about businesses having to keep up with modern technology they came to the conclusion that businesses already well established didn't need to advertise themselves on-line as much as they already had a good customer base which is what I can relate back to in my research document with David Ross Fabrications.

This conversation then led to one of the young students explaining her friend had started a tanning business and twitter had helped her massively and she solely used this to promote the business, using business cards with the link to the twitter and website but didnt use any leaflets or flyers. The older participants argued that she should also create leaflets for the less technical generation but the base of business being tanning had a young market but other businesses should take this into consideration for all ages of people in the market of the product.

There was then a conversation about how emails are used massively to sell special offers and how discount codes can easily be sent out to provide advertisement for the business. Groupon and Moonpig are based on line but have no actual shop, Asos is massive for selling clothes but again there is no shop. Will it be like this in the future? The mother stated how she much prefers to go to the shop to try clothes on and see the food she is buying rather than get it all online.