1. What are you focusing on?In the research Business research design’, we focus on discover the understanding about customer behavior against domestic and imported cars in Vietnam. Particularly, basing on investigating the imported cars’ situation as well as the consumed cars’ one in Vietnam, the research aims to figure out the reasons why Vietnamese car users are not really favorable of domestic cars in comparison with the imported ones. This is considered as a crucial study because although the research result may not help to boost the Vietnamese automobile industry, it will point out the weaknesses of the industry and from that improve them in favor of customer demand as much as possible. Actually, this will be crucial in the next few years because with TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), tariff for all goods in general and for automobile in particular will go down to 0 percent, this leads to the fact that the imported car’s price will decrease steadily and it might be lower than the domestic car’s price.
The research will give the appropriate answers for these questions. The paper would make the comparison between imported and domestic produced cars as well as conduct the research methods to acknowledge consumption habits, perceptions and opinions of purchasing for cars. Particularly, the Business Model Canvas (BMC) – the business model has been introduced in class is applied to address these problems. For developing new or documenting existing business models, BMC will be used as a strategic management and lean startup pattern since this model will support firms in arranging their activities by demonstrating their potential tradeoffs. BMC is a visual chart consisting of a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers and finances.
The business model is described with 9 building blocks including customer segments, value propositions, distribution channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key activities, key resources, key partnerships and cost structure. Therefore with this model, we could give understanding, discussion, creativity and analysis supporting for the research. 2. Sketch your CLN team’s progressFor CLN team’s progress, we considered the T-shape to get an understanding and appreciation of the research problem in two characteristic dimensions including breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge.
The vertical stroke of the T’ is the depth of skill that allows a person to contribute deep disciplinary expertise to the creative process. The horizontal stroke of the T’ is the broader passions and disposition for collaboration across disciplines. At first, our team focused on brainstorming the main outline of the research. This step seems so easy but this is the one taking lots of time as well as creating intensive debates within our group since each of us gave the different opinion on it and each of them fight against to another. However, after listening the ideas from each other and discussing together, we could agree with the final outline and continued develop it in details. In the next step, we concentrated on investigating the information related to customer behavior toward domestic as well as imported cars in Vietnam.
From our point of view, this is really important because it will form the strong cornerstone for us to further discover the main purpose of the research or find out the answer for research question. When deeply understanding about the circumstance of customer behavior toward automobile industry, we continued to take an overview on the literature review associated to this topic. Obviously, consulting the previous related researches will give us the right direction for the conducting study. In this step, we had to find out a variety of articles related to the research topic and then refilled them to find out the best ones and then concentrated to investigated these researches as the significant fundamental for further study the research in the next steps. One of the main step of this research is to compare between domestic produced and imported cars in terms of design, price, design, technology and feature to clarify the differences between them and from that theoretically point out why the domestic customers prefer the imported ones. Besides that, quantitative (including intercept interviews and online survey) and qualitative (including focus group), data analysis method, ethical research also conduct to clarify the research questions.
3. What worked and what did not?As mentioned above, to investigate the research topic, a wide range of research method employed including quantitative (intercept interviews and online survey), qualitative (focus group), data analysis method and ethical research with a questionnaire consisting of there parts including personal information, their current cars and opinions in local manufactured car versus imported cars. Particularly, for quantitative research method of intercept interview, customers will be asked to join in an interview right after they register to purchase an imported car for themselves. This is considered as the simple, time-saving and relevant approach in understanding customer attitudes. However, there will be the risk of the sample being over-influenced by interviewers by the choice of words, body language and ways of asking questions, which the given answers would not fairly reflect customer opinions. Furthermore, with online survey, we can accumulate the ideas from a massive number of respondents in a short time.
Due to this feature, the survey format is built to contain questions in form of multiple choice and/or short essay questions, prior to be uploaded on the online media channels. By this method, we can achieve a general understanding of customer perceptions toward imported cars, therefore it is beneficial for both researchers and respondents since it takes a short time and minimal efforts for arranging the questions while the answers cover various dimensions about consumption habits. However the drawback of this method is that it only presents a general overview of the topic basing on how answerers understand the questions. Moreover, by implementing the focus group qualitative research, we gather a small group of people (less than 15) for answering questions related to their acknowledgement, attitudes and beliefs toward a specific topic.
For the area of purchasing imported cars, the focus group can be used to find out the research answers. Our team has gathered up to 15 people from the strategic audience segmentation of the study to seek data associated to consuming habits, perceptions and feelings when they consider buying an imported car. This method, though providing profound knowledge and discovering new characteristics of customer favorites, it takes a long time and large budget with the limitation of respondents. In addition, for the data analysis method, we employed the Quasi-statistics method to analyze the collected data from the focus group interview. Besides that, ethical research is also employed to figure out the research answers. Although these aforementioned methods have contributed to help the team investigate the research questions, there are some drawbacks remaining related to questionnaire.
Being a collectivist culture, Vietnamese hardly speak up their personal thinking, so the interview is expected to dig into unspoken facts which affects deeply such as customer emotion, expectation on personal image build and lifestyle which are not covered in the survey. 4. What would you have done differently? Based on this, how might your process change in the future?As we mentioned in the limitation part in the research, for qualitative, in the data-collected content, the power of control by participants are larger than researchers which they cannot collect all needed information and expand the study if participants provide irrelevant information or are not open to share important information. Furthermore, the qualitative research analysis would be time-consuming for the preparation of finding affirmations for the purpose of identifying the idea movements. On behalf of interview limitations, in term of the interview arrangement, the types of questionnaires and the census samples are mostly adapted for respondents. Following the questionnaire factor, respondents are required to understand the questions in the same way as the main aim of the research, which the questions are required to be clear and easy to be understood.
Furthermore, interviewers would not always be willing to cooperate, causing problems in the research study and may enhance the cost for offering supplementary. The unfaithful attitudes and concerns of respondents would also lead to unrealistic data collect content, compared with the reality in local market. Therefore for me, to minimize these forecasted limitations, there are some improvement should be conducted. Firstly, it needs to prolong the data-collecting period to make sure that although researchers are less than participants, it is possible to collect all needed information and expand study. The longer time of researching will enable the research group to do so. Secondly, for questionnaire for interview, I will try to compose the list of questions, which is easy to understand to make sure that it will be understood by interviewers in the same way as the purpose of the researchers.
The best way for me is conducting the interview at the selling agent of imported cars for the long time. This will help to make sure that the respondents are the ones the research aiming to. At that time, they can give the best answers than anytime else since they could give the appropriate response corresponding to their feelings and thought about their purchased car. In conclusion, these methods do not aim to change the research method but try to improve the existing drawbacks to give the better research results.
5. What will you do next?Due to the limitations for the time of the research, our team could not give the best questionnaire for the research to bring the most satisfied outcome. However, in the future with the application of the aforementioned improvements combined with the experience gaining from this first research, I will spend more time to further deeply understand the situation of producing car industry in Vietnam as well as the imported car demand of Vietnamese customers and continue to update the information on these in the future. Besides that, I will try to further investigate the articles and papers related to the customer behavior toward domestic and imported cars in Vietnam to deeply understand on this topic. Business Model Canvas will still to be the best business model employed to help me discover this research topic.
This is because for me this business model will create the favorable conditions for me to do so. In the future, by doing these things, I will continue to follow this topic, analyzing it in the context of globalization in general and integration into the region and the world of Vietnam in particularly. The situation of Vietnam participating in ASEAN Economic Community and TPP(Trans-Pacific Partnership) will contribute to enhance the distance between the domestic and imported cars since with these events the imported cars will be easier in pervading in Vietnamese automobile market. Therefore the customer preferences will be more different than the current situation. The research topic, thus, will be needed to further discover to adapt the market demand for automobile industry. For Vietnamese domestic car, the researches related to this topic, therefore, will be more important because understanding deeply the facing obstacles, the industry can be easier in making plans to improve and than further develop the industry in the future.
In conclusion, it is significant to conduct this research in supporting for the development of Vietnamese automobile industry. Furthermore, the continuous research related to this topic is considered as the important thing to further assist the automobile growth in the future with the trend of globalization around the world as well as the upcoming integration of Vietnam in economic sector. What workedWhat did notA fair, open and empowering environment was created so that everyone could share ideas comfortably and contribute the best. There was no official team leader or coordinator of the whole teamwork process. This made the communication among team members really weak after class, making the cooperation and preparation for the proposal not as good as it could be. The content of the proposal was put under thorough discussion among the whole team to ensure everyone understand the total picture, not just one single part of their own.
Even if the editor made any change in the final version, the task owner was also informed and well explained with the reason behind. There was no planning and clear schedule of what to be done. Everyone made assumption that everyone well understood and could complete the best proposal independently with her parts. Then it turned out to be not and the final editor had to bear a very heavy job due to time constraints.
