12a

Buyers Behavior

1. Segment: The specific segment I have chosen are freshman college students at the University of Florida with busy schedules and enough spending money to buy a room cleaning service.

2. Interviewed three people around my dorm that had the need.

Interview 1: First agreed that they fit the category of a freshman living in a dorm that was what they considered too busy to look after their own room so they would be motivated to hire a cleaning service. Continued to go into detail about their schedule being very different each day and depending on weird times so that the only difficulty would be arranging when to have their room cleaned.

Interview 2: This person also agreed they fit the proper criteria for the segment. Their difficulty was that they wouldn’t be 100% set on using this product because they wouldn’t trust the quality of cleaning. I think this obstacle can be very easily overcome because once a few cleaners do a good job, word would spread and the cleaning reputation would hold its own and convince someone like this potential customer to be into using the service.

Interview 3: Again, fitting into the assumed segment was agreed upon. Unlike the other two interviews, this customer had no real-time constraint on when his room could be cleaned. This was because he was constantly doing work and managing his time out of his own dorm room, however, he just was willing to pay for this service. This customer had arguably the freest time but was also the most willing to pay for this service.

3. Through not only these interviews, but the past ones as well, it has become obvious when these needs are most meet and how the demands fluctuate. So, because this problem is focused on having an unclean dorm room, this issue has pretty consistently reoccurred every two weeks for each customer I have interviewed. I know the need is demanded within the dorm rooms and occurs because over a span of about two weeks that people’s schedules pile up and they slowly lose time and ability to clean their room.

4. What really interested me is what each customer said in terms of how they wanted to fix their need. The customers had dirty dorm rooms, so one would assume that they would google a service to come clean it. Instead, surprisingly a majority of the customers said the first thing they did when their room was too messy and wanted to solve it was call their parents. This later came to not surprise me as much because the more I thought about it the more it made sense. For a lot of these students it might just be the first time they are taking care of their own space. This would cause them to call the only people they consider to being aware to manage their own space, their parents.

5. From these interviews I learned that my service would probably have high and low periods depending and fluctuating on the start of school and two weeks after. I realized that as oddly as it sounds, there is a period after the parents drop the kids off, around every two weeks, that rooms get dirty. This would create an influx of demand every two weeks when rooms are cleaned but not heavily in between. People may demand to have better kept rooms more consistently, allowing for some variation and more demand in between the high periods of every two weeks.

6. I learned that generally this is a well understood segment. College kids are often the target of many products so it is a well understood demographic. Additionally, being a part of the demographic myself, allows for me to better understa