BUSN20016 Research in Business For Ecommerce Industry

Answer:

Introduction

This report will propose to investigate the impact of branding on the sales rates of different companies. Globalization have changed the current competitive market due to the implementation of free trade.  On the other hand, technology advanced significantly which led to the emergence of the ecommerce industry. The competition is very high in the ecommerce industry due to the increase of the large number of the companies (Yeboah,  2016). A large number of companies have been spending huge sums of money on improving their brand equity. There has been significant transition from product orientation to marketing orientation and marketing strategies are not enough to increase sustainable competitive advantage.  

This is the reason that companies aim to improve their brand image to impact the perception of the consumers and tell the story the brand wants to portray. Branding depicts the role the organization wants to play in their lives and the value that is being added to the products. Branding is responsible for increasing the sales of the products as it increases the awareness of the consumers regarding the products offered by a company when a need is generated (Burns & Tran, 2014).  The study will initially identify the issues and these issues will be addressed using the research. The research objectives and research questions will be developed based on the issues.  The report will provide justification for choosing the topic and the expected output. The study will develop the methodology based on the type of data to be collected and analysis to be conducted. This report will also develop the budget, project schedule and the Gantt chart.

Problem statement

The majority of the study has focused on identifying the influence of branding on the buying behaviour of the consumers. However, none of the studies have addressed the issue of identifying the influence of branding on the sales rate. Effective branding ensures that organizations gain supremacy over the products offered by the rival companies.  The majority of the researches have narrowed down the topic by identify branding for a particular company or specific area but this study will aim to compare products between the different companies to identify how branding effects the sales of these products. This will enable to understand how consumers perceive products based on their branding. This study will aim to take a different perspective on branding impacts and will use comparison as a means of evaluating the impact on the sales volumes of products of different brands.

Aim and objectives/research questions 

This study will depict the impact of branding on the sales volumes of different companies based on similar products. This study will initially collect data of all the reputed brands and similar products offered by them.  The brand image of the different products will be evaluated and the influence of these products on sales rate of each of the products of the brand will be examined to identify the relationship.  The difference in sales rates between the companies will determine the effectiveness of branding of each of the companies.

• To collect and extract the list of similar products with the different brands
• To interpret the brand image of a product
• To extract the sales’ rate for the products with different brand image
• To find the difference between the sales’ rate products with different brand image

Research Objective

• What is the impact of branding on the sales rate of products in different companies?
• What is the brand image of different product in a company?
• What is the sales rate for the products with different brand image?
• What is the difference between the sales’ rate products with different brand image

Justification and potential output of the research

The review of the different peer reviewed journals and articles have focused on identifying the impact of branding of consumers behaviour and their perceptions.  However, none of the studies have done a comparative analysis of the different products offered by diverse companies in similar category.  The importance of branding in ecommerce industry has not been taken into consideration in most of the studies. Therefore, the study will aim to address this issue to provide a different dimension to branding and its impacts.  

The study will address all the research question to develop relevant findings that will be linked to the objective of the study.  The results from the study will highlight the impact of branding on similar products of different companies.  This result will show the effectiveness of branding in most of these companies and the companies can use these results to improve their branding strategy to develop a stringer brand equity.  

Conceptual framework and hypothesis development 

Branding 

Branding can be defined with the help of proper understanding of the term “brand”. A brand is thereby considered to be an image or idea of specific products with which the consumers are able to connect in an effective manner. Branding on the other hand is considered to be the process with the help of which the image or idea of the product is marketed. This plays a major role in increasing the awareness of the brand among the consumers. The advertising professionals of different organizations are able to build the brand in an effective manner and its reputation is also increased with the help of this process (Agostini, Filippini & Nosella, 2015).

According to Babi? Rosario et al. (2016), branding is thereby considered to be a major part of the e-commerce based activities of modern companies. The branding based process is further helpful in increasing the sales volumes and revenues of the company. The brands mainly use different platforms like the web pages and the search engines which can increase awareness of the products in the market. The proper coordination of the brand names and domain names are considered to be a major part of finding the clients and the visitors and further increasing its value in the market as well. Branding is also considered to be an important process which helps in developing the assets of the company. The branding based efforts of the organizations are able to affect the sales volumes of modern organizations in a huge manner.

Effect of branding on sales volumes 

As discussed by Huang and Sarigöllü (2014), a brand is considered to be the identity which has been developed by the organization or its services and products. The branding based process is thereby able to incorporate the different visual aspects which are defined by the enterprise. The various visual aspects which are a part of the branding based process thereby include, graphics, logos, sounds, video and colours. The different aspects that are thereby communicated with the help of this process include, culture, emotions, personality, conscience and experience. The different key factors which are thereby able to influence the sales of the company are,

• Advocacy – More than 30% of total number of people recommend a brand which they like or follow on the social media.
• Brand – More than 20% of the total number of consumers have said that they purchase new products due to loyalty towards a brand.
• Conversions – More than 30% of the moms buy the products which they like on Facebook.
• Email marketing – More than 60% of the total number of total number of respondents have opened an email which has been sent by the companies which they trust (Datta, Ailawadi & van Heerde, 2017).
• Search – 16% increase in the brand recall has been an important part of the recognized brand.
• Social media – More than 70% of the total number of brand conversations on the social media are done by people who mainly look for information or advice.
• Word of mouth – The brands which inspire higher levels of emotional intensity receive high rates of word of mouth advertising (Cao & Li, 2015).

According to Schivinski and Dabrowski (2015), the branding based activities hold high amounts of weightage on the purchase based decision of the consumers. The impactful marketing strategies need to be deployed in different channels of the company. However, these strategies ultimately tend to fail if the decisions of the consumers are against the company. The changes which have taken in the modern business environment have started having major effects on the ways by which marketing departments of different organizations operate. The marketing and the sales departments of the modern organizations thereby need to be operate together in an effective manner.

According to Zoellner and Schaefers (2015), the service or the product thereby needs to satisfy the needs of consumers. The issues that are faced by the consumers can also be solved effectively with the help of different creative marketing based strategies which have been employed by the company. Most important duty which needs to be fulfilled by the marketing department before developing effective branding strategies is listening to the needs of the customers. The demands and needs of the consumers need to be fulfilled by the company effectively in order to increase the sales.

The growth in sales levels is thereby affected in a huge manner by the strategies which are developed by the marketing department of the modern organizations. The marketing department further needs to keep track of feelings and thoughts of customers in order to develop the effective branding based strategies. The company will be able to reach the customers easily with the help of different branding based strategies. This will play a major role in increasing the levels of profitability and sales volumes (Bahadir, Bharadwaj & Srivastava, 2015). The branding process is thereby able to affect the sales volumes of modern organizations in an effective manner.

Hypothesis Development

Methodology 

Research methodology describes the choice of philosophy, approach, design, sampling, reliability, validity and ethics. This factors are described as per Saunders research onion which will unfold the methods used in stages of the study to collect data and evaluate it accordingly (Mackey & Gass, 2015).   There are different types of researches based on the goals set in a study and in this study explanation is the main aim. Experimental will be used to describe the behaviour of the phenomenon, predictions and evaluation of cause and effect relationship. This is an applied research as the research has identified a specific issue and addressing it (Saunders et al., 2015). The results obtained from the study will be used by practitioners to improve their brand image and equity.

Research Philosophy

Philosophical assumptions are essential for establishing the core value system in the study. These values are developed based on the aims of the study and forms framework for systematically performing the collection and evaluation of data. Realism, positivism, interpretivism and pragmatism are the four types of philosophies in research (Saunders et al., 2015). However, in this scenario, positivism has been chosen as the research philosophy as it facilitates in collecting discrete data and quantify them effectively. Thus, statistical analysis can be used to draw relevant conclusion from the study. Positivism also facilities in uncovering hidden fact and provides a different dimension to the study.

Research Approach and sources of data

Deductive, inductive and abductive are the three types of approaches in researches. On the other hand, various researchers consider the choice between the quantitative and qualitative data as the research approach (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016). Deductive approach is used in quantitative analysis of data and inductive approach is used for qualitative analysis of data. On the other hand, abductive approach is used for mixed methods. In this current study, deductive approach will be used to prove the developed hypothesis using quantitative data analysis techniques.  The deductive approach will help in examining the causal relationship between the variables and generalise the research findings.  

The study uses secondary data collection method to collect data from various sources. The secondary data will be collected from peer reviewed journals and articles for developing the literature. However, there are web sources that will provide relevant information and open data sets for conducting these kinds of studies (Quinlan et al., 2019). These datasets will form the dataset for the research and will be used to analyse the data and develop research findings.  ‘Dataset of 22,000 fashion products on Amazon’ (Appendix) has been chosen as the data set out of all the given data set to develop relevant results.  The website contains information regarding the fashion products offered by amazon counting upto 7million products. These products have specific attributes attached to and they are ‘product name’, ‘manufacturer’, ‘price’, ‘number available in stock’, ‘number of reviews’, ‘number of answered questions’, ‘average review rating, amazon category and sub category’, ‘customer who bought this item also bought’, ‘description’, ‘product information’, ‘items’, ‘customers buy after viewing this item’, ‘customer reviews’, and ‘sellers’. The data source links are given in the appendix section and it can be used to access the data that will be used in the study.

Research Design

There are two types of research design in the study and they are exploratory and conclusive. The exploratory research design is used for developing exploring data and conduct in depth analysis to examine the nature of the issues. However, exploratory research does not give a conclusion to the study (Meyers, Gamst & Guarino, 2016).  On the other hand, conclusive research design aims to provide relevant conclusion by providing description and establishing relationship. The conclusive study can be further divided into causal research design and descriptive research design. In this study, causal research design will be used for description of behaviour and establishing the cause and effect relationship.

Data Analysis

The data will be analysed using the statistical tools such as SPSS (statistical tool of social sciences). SPSS will be used to develop descriptive statistics which will consist of mean, median, mode and standard deviation (Treiman, 2014).  The correlation between each of the variables will be identified using the Pearson’s correlation method which will establish the degree and nature of relationship between the variables. Cronbach’s alpha will be used to test the reliability of the data sets. The regression analysis will be developed to prove the hypothesis and establish the relationship between sales rate and branding.

Sampling

Sampling is the method of selecting data from a large population sample. Sampling is used to ease the calculation and reduce the time and cost of conducting the study.  In sampling initially, the target population is chosen and the data set has been chosen as the target population (Palinkas et al., 2015).  The next step is the identification of the sampling frame which will consist the similar products from different brands. The final step is the identification of the sample size and in this study, 500 sample data will be analysed.  There are two types of sampling methods, one is probabilistic sampling and another is non-probabilistic sampling.  This study will use probabilistic sampling to randomly select data from the huge data set. Simple random sampling is the method of collecting data from the overall data sets and provides equal opportunity for the elements to be selected.

Organization of the study 

The organization of the study are as follows:

• The first chapter will comprise of introduction where the research topic will be introduced and relevant information regarding the research aims, objectives, question and significance of the study will be identified.
• The second chapter of the study will consist of the literature review where various peer reviewed journals will be used to critically evaluate the research topic to identify the gap in previous researches.
• The third chapter of the research will consist of developing the appropriate methods, framework and design to conduct the study. The overall method for collecting data and analysis it will be defined using the research methodology.
• The fourth chapter of the study will consist of developing results from the collected data by using inferential statistics and analysis will be conducted to provide relevant results.
• The final chapter of the study is conclusion which will link the results from the study with the objective to provide recommendations and conclusions.  

Budget, project schedule and Gantt chart 

The table below shows the overall budget required for conducting the research as data is not freely accessible from all websites and subscription is required in most of the cases to access the data sets.

Gantt Chart

References

Agostini, L., Filippini, R., & Nosella, A. (2015). Brand?building efforts and their association with SME sales performance. Journal of Small Business Management, 53, 161-173.

Babi? Rosario, A., Sotgiu, F., De Valck, K., & Bijmolt, T. H. (2016). The effect of electronic word of mouth on sales: A meta-analytic review of platform, product, and metric factors. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(3), 297-318.

Bahadir, S. C., Bharadwaj, S. G., & Srivastava, R. K. (2015). Marketing mix and brand sales in global markets: Examining the contingent role of country-market characteristics. Journal of International Business Studies, 46(5), 596-619.

Burns, S. T., & Tran, G. Q. (2014). The Effects of Social Media & Web Development on Product Promotion & The Effects of Branding on Sales and Building a Startup.

Cao, L., & Li, L. (2015). The impact of cross-channel integration on retailers’ sales growth. Journal of Retailing, 91(2), 198-216.

Datta, H., Ailawadi, K. L., & van Heerde, H. J. (2017). How well does consumer-based brand equity align with sales-based brand equity and marketing-mix response?. Journal of Marketing, 81(3), 1-20.

Huang, R., & Sarigöllü, E. (2014). How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. In Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors (pp. 113-132). Springer, New York, NY.

Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. Routledge.

Meyers, L. S., Gamst, G., & Guarino, A. J. (2016). Applied multivariate research: Design and interpretation. Sage publications.

Palinkas, L. A., Horwitz, S. M., Green, C. A., Wisdom, J. P., Duan, N., & Hoagwood, K. (2015). Purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 42(5), 533-544.

Quinlan, C., Babin, B., Carr, J., & Griffin, M. (2019). Business research methods. South Western Cengage.

Saunders, M. N., Lewis, P., Thornhill, A., & Bristow, A. (2015). Understanding research philosophy and approaches to theory development.

Schivinski, B., & Dabrowski, D. (2015). The impact of brand communication on brand equity through Facebook. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 9(1), 31-53.

Sekaran, U., & Bougie, R. (2016). Research methods for business: A skill building approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Treiman, D. J. (2014). Quantitative data analysis: Doing social research to test ideas. John Wiley & Sons.

Yeboah, M. (2016). Impact of Product Branding on Sales Revenue of Listed Companies in Ghana. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 6(9), 112-124.

Zoellner, F., & Schaefers, T. (2015). Do Price Promotions Help or Hurt Premium-Product Brands?: The Impact of Different Price-Promotion Types On Sales and Brand Perception. Journal of Advertising Research, 55(3), 270-283.