Vodka market: a research story
Introduction
Well, this semester was definitely episodic: a pandemic swinging above our heads and tumbling every day life as we knew it. But when the first and basic difficulties were overcome, ADandPRLab got back to work as usual, but this time, with sessions through videocalls and remote work.
Our Market and New Media Research Lab’s subject was to choose a product market -in teams as always- and conduct research about it, throughout the semester. When it came to choosing, our team went with the vodka market!
Of course we chose this kind of product because we were all interested in knowing more about its market’s growth during the last years, but also due to our love for drinking and having fun!
So let’s go through all the steps we took, from the beginning to the end.
Secondary Research
At first we got a brief view of the market growth in the last seven years, we found the main competitors, and of course the category’s main opportunities and threats.
Then it was time for us to find our category’s most known brands which were also completely different with each other. And the creative part -we always love this part- was to create a persona for each of the two brands. After some discussion with the team, we chose Serkova and Belvedere to be our protagonists.
Serkova is common and affordable, so we pictured it as a young adult, probably a student like us, and Belvedere on the other hand, as the luxurious one, took the role of a middle-aged successful business man.
Primary Research
After that, we conducted a qualitative research on March, including a focus group of eight vodka users, in order to create a great brand mapping, which was also a very interesting and amusing process. Along with the map, we found some other vodka categories as well, and they were all according to the linchpin of price-quality.
The next part was probably the most demanding, but also the most engaging and useful. We made a quantitative research through an online survey that was basically a “usage and attitude questionnaire” consisted of ten questions.
We finished and forwarded the questionnaire in April, and we were very happy to count one hundred respondents in just a few days. Good job you drinkers out there!
The majority of the respondents was female students, 18–24 years old, some of them working at the same time.
Some of our major findings were the following: the most important factors the user takes into account before buying a vodka brand are taste, quality, price, reputation and availability, and the most common occasion for vodka consumption is a club party. Well, at least before the corona virus…
The Infographics
And last but not least, with the help of a very useful digital tool, our beloved Piktochart, we created some nice infographics in order to demonstrate the key findings of our whole research about the vodka market. We mentioned the most heavy users and the most known brands, the most popular vodka which is Absolut, the most common occasions of consumption and the global market’s basic facts.
Conclusion
As we mentioned before, this semester was a big challenge for all of us. We missed out on a lot of stuff, including our face-to-face lessons. Distance learning was something new, but despite the technical obstacles, we managed to do all of our sessions the best way possible under these circumstances. The group chat on messenger went crazy during all quarantine, but in the end we did it. We learned to use new research methods, to create a good and clear questionnaire, to illustrate our findings in aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible ways, and of course to work under demanding conditions, always as a team!
The Team
Team Ad-just: @Maria Giannikou Daphne Zacharia Konstantina Kallergi Ioannis Kogias Merope Kolokassidou Vasiliki Kotti Marialena Papangeli @Kalliopi-Maria Polydoropoulou
Our Presentation
Betty Tsakarestou Dimitra Iordanoglou Konstantinos Ioannidis
