Hi again!
Last week, we were looking at a brief given to us by our tutor. This brief outlined the fact that not many young people save for the future, and even less save for retirement. We were tasked with coming up with potential solutions for this issue that will encourage young people to save money (and learn about it too!). Me, along with my group members, James and Pete, came up with a few solutions. Firstly, we proposed an idea in which people could save with a social network, and compare savings or compete for prizes. Another idea was to make an advertising campaign which depicted a person’s life being better if they save money for the future, because “a dollar tomorrow is worth more than a dollar today!”
Anyway, before coming up with prototypes with any potential, we first had to research our demographic. Our demographic for this task was, of course, young people in their late teens to mid-late twenties, and we all know where people that age congregate! Facebook! So my group members and I wrote a survey and distributed it via Facebook. Our feedback was mostly unsurprising, although we were quite confused when we found that not a single person wanted to share their financial information via social networking. We quickly figured out that this was due to people not wanting to brag about money or not wanting to see that someone else has more money than them. People, of course, wanted to win prizes for saving, which is a complete no-brainer, people will do anything if it means they could win something, right?
We also asked people about their main form of entertainment. Most people answered that they watched TV, surfed the internet, watched movies, and watched Youtube videos. This of course shows us the best places to advertise our new product, this could eventually be even more specific, by researching the content of each media outlet that people in our demographic will watch the most, and then targeting our advertising at the right time (Meaning that we probably won’t do a good job at advertising to young adults during Antiques Roadshow).
To finish off our investigation, we asked people how much money they thought they would need to support their lifestyle after retiring. The numbers varied a huge amount, from $100, 000 all the way to $5, 000 000, which is a huge difference, so of course we would need to include accurate figures in our advertising, in order to teach people how much money they need, because it’s a pretty important detail.
I think our method of surveying was done well when we only had a few days to get answers, and only our combined friends lists on Facebook to answer our questions, but it is not a 100% accurate depiction of our demographic’s opinions, because we need to think about who would have taken the survey. What we definitely know is that people who took the survey are a very small sample of people in this demographic, all are Facebook users, and all are friends with one of me or my group members. We also know that many people would have seen “Survey” and thought “Nope. Not doing a survey,” effectively giving us a small sample of people who were either really bored or just wanted to help us out. In my opinion, the best way to survey a huge group of people for this would be to distribute it over many different media outlets, and perhaps throw in an incentive to encourage more people into actually partaking.
I think as a first exercise, this worked well, we learned more about our demographic, and we crossed off a possible idea due to the survey, which changed our direction to one which would have eventually lead to a much better solution in the end. We now know that people do not want to compare savings, as sharing that information can make people feel spoilt, guilty, or even embarrassed, which is not a good way to encourage sharing saving progress socially.
Liam Sheppard 