12A- Figuring Out Buyer Behavior Process

Segment: For my segment, I chose the area of college students. I interviewed a freshman at UF from Virginia, a sophomore at UF from Maryland, and senior here at UF from Tampa, FL.

Interviews and Findings: During my interviews, I discovered that there is definitely a need out there for this service, however, it is very reliant on the conveniency to get it and if the student comes from out of state or not. When asked about what moments trigger their awareness for the need, the freshman said when he is trying to budget and spending way too much money than he really needs to such as grocery shopping. The sophomore said around lunch and dinner time because he does not know how to cook and eating the microwaveable and snack foods is a waste of money and makes him feel sick after a while. The senior said now, it is when he needs to schedule things and plan his week, but back when he was a freshman it was definitely when he needed to do laundry and cook for himself and be able to find time to do that all as well. However, he did say that being from Tampa, he was able to go home a lot to get food, have some stuff cleaned for him once in a while, but mostly just see his family more to relieve the stress of being at school sometimes.  I found that the awareness occurs most to the students when comes to finances and cooking but always around the later times like the evening when it is after classes or work and now you have to worry about what/ how to cook, what/ how to clean, where to go get your essentials and how much it will be. Usually when you were in high school, once school was done at around 2:30-3, if you didn't have practice or homework your day was practically over and you didn't have to worry about most of those additional responsibilities. When the need becomes aware to the students, everyone's first move was either to call their parents or look it up on google. That was surprising to me because I the first things I did when I was in those situations was ask my roommates if they knew, however, when I asked if they ever though to do that first, two of them responded by saying they didn't want the first impressions to make them seem like they were clueless of how to be independent (even though that was the case for most of them). I asked what their google search history looked like as far as these type of questions and some main terms or searches I got were, "how to cook in college", "essential college foods", "surviving college first year", and my personal favorite, "How to make clothes not shrink when washing". Overall, the students like to use google the most because they also said they felt bad calling their parents every day and also did not want them to feel concerned about them or worry that they weren't able to take care of themselves. It seems pretty common that whenever anyone has a question or concern of any kind they will go straight to google or online first before they ask other people.

Conclusions: In terms of need awareness and information search, this segment is definitely in need of this type of solution, however, it would have to be readily available for them to get such as an app or close by advisory program because not a lot of kids have time in their already busy schedules to go somewhere further away or something that would be like another class and most first year college students have very limited transportation. It was also be aimed a little more towards the students farther away from home such as out of state or even just more than a few hour drive because the ones that cannot see their family and get more assistance often are the ones that feel more stressed and struggle more and therefore would be in more need of a solution of our type.