Assignment 15A

1. The first person that I interviewed felt that price was the most important thing. He explained that when he is picking between show feeds, he will usually try the cheapest one first; if it seems good enough, he keeps using it. If it seems to be inefficient or lacking in quality, he will change it up and start feeding the one that is closest in price, and so on. The next person also picks their feeds by price, but they have a different method of picking which feed to keep. Rather than basing it on whether they like the feed or not, they go solely on price; every few weeks, she looks at the different prices and whichever is the cheapest is the one she gets that time around. The third said that his method is to find the best all-around feed; he looks for one with a middle of the pack price and quality and feeds it as long as it seems to be effective and the price stays about the same; this allows him to feed a little bit more than he would if he were to feed a higher price feed, but not need as much as the ones that are the cheapest.

2. All three potential customers were forced to buy their feed in the store, and all three agreed that if my idea worked out (the school that they or their children attend buy the feed and they in turn buy it from the school), they would be very interested as it would save them the drive and time going to the feed store every week.

3. The first customer reviews the 'rightness' of the product often and focuses on finding the right balance between quality and lowest price. The second customer focuses entirely on price, and therefore feels that they made the right purchase any time that they get the most inexpensive feed available. The final customer is similar to the first in the fact that they aim for a comparison between quality and price, but they are different due to the fact that the final customer is willing and able to move up into the middle tier of price in order to find that superior quality whereas the first customer is either not willing or not able.

4. I would aim to satisfy the idea of evaluating alternatives by keeping track of the other brands and the prices that they are selling for. Keeping my price right around or just under these brands at the very highest makes my feed a feasible option for every exhibitor, and keeping the quality at a comparable level becomes the focus for those that are able to purchase the more expensive brand name feeds. By keeping a good balance between these two areas, I will likely get more people to buy my feed over time, as the reputation for a cheaper and equal quality feed spreads. I will evaluate the post-purchase mindset of the customers in two ways; first, I can keep track of who continues to come back and buy the same amount of feed or more, as well as those that buy smaller amounts over time. This is a possible way to see those that are growing to like the feed more and those that trust in it less, with the obvious pitfall of changing numbers in animals also changing the amounts of feed sold (if someone has 10 cows and sells 9 of them, they will purchase less feed by a large amount buy also may completely love the feed). In order to avoid those pitfalls, I will also have informal surveys with customers in order to determine what they think about the feed, what they want to change and what they want to stay the same moving into the future.