Haven McCoy
Fall 2024
Market Research
Research Problem(s) Studied
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The Oral-B electric toothbrush might not be of interest to my target audience.
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The prices of the Oral-B electric toothbrushes are somewhat high and our target audience may not want to spend that much on a toothbrush.
The research option that I have chosen is to survey 4-6 potential customers
Market research assists students in making informed decisions in the final marketing plan
Part Two
After making minor tweaks to my survey based on feedback, I was able to receive 6 responses to my survey that I created. I sent the link to my survey to 20 of my friends in the dental hygiene program that attend IU Indianapolis. These people are all female and they range from the ages of 20 to 41. 50% of the people that took the survey said they used a Sonicare toothbrush, 33.3% of them use an Oral-B toothbrush, and 16.7% use a manual toothbrush. I asked the surveyors how clean their teeth felt after brushing on a scale of 1-10. Three responses said that they felt like their teeth felt like an 8 on the scale, two responded that they felt like a 9 on the scale, and only one felt like a 10 on the scale. The responses were 50/50 between Oral-B and Sonicare when asked what brand of toothbrush they see the most ads about. 83.3% of the respondents already use an electric toothbrush, but the 1 person that does not already use an electric toothbrush said that they would choose an Oral-B electric toothbrush over a Sonicare. Four people said that they see ads for electric toothbrushes on social media, one person said they see ads on television, and one said they see ads on the internet. 5 of the surveyors said that cool technology and features makes they more likely to use a toothbrush. Only one person said that they are more likely to use a toothbrush because of the price. The main responses for what matters most to them when purchasing a toothbrush, they responded effectiveness and cost.
What I learned from conducting this research is that the results lead to there being a 50/50 split between people preferring either Sonicare or Oral-B as their choice for a toothbrush, no matter if they use it or not. This means that Sonicare is Oral-B’s biggest competitor based on my research. I did include the Colgate brand in a few of my responses, and no one chose that option. Out of all of the people that responded to my survey, all of them seemed to prefer to use an electric brush over a manual brush. Effectiveness and cost seem to be the most important things to our consumers when purchasing a brush, so I definitely need to take that into consideration.
These results will influence my marketing plan by making sure that I focus more on the effectiveness of the brush. The cost can be lowered, but we want to make sure we put more emphasis on the effectiveness of the toothbrush so that we can make more money from the brush to invest in developing a more effective version of the brush down the line. It seems that many people are more likely to care more about the cool technology and features of the toothbrush and more likely to pay more if these features are included within the product. I think many people see this healthcare product as an investment, and although cost is an important factor, I feel like we could use the technology and features of the Oral-B iO toothbrush to our advantage and show those off more, so the cost of the brush doesn’t seem like as much of a factor. The last thing that will influence my marketing plan is where we market our product. People seem to see most of their ads for toothbrushes on social media, so we need to format most of our ads to be located there, but also need to push the ads out to television and the general internet, so that people that may not have social media are still getting exposure to our ads that we put out.
