Question

You are a business consultant at a small consulting firm in Sydney Australia. A client Ben McDonald from office supplies retailer “Office Storeroom” has contacted you to ask for your help. Ben is the newly appointed sales manager at Office Storeroom. You arrange a meeting with Ben at a local coffee shop. During the meeting Ben explains that Office Storeroom is the longest running office supplies company in Australia, having started business in 1973. They pride themselves on providing the most affordable office supplies available. They sell office supplies to businesses and personal shoppers.

They have 15 retail outlets across Australia, one store in each of the major cities and a few in some of the larger regional areas. Office supplies are also sold online, via the Office Storeroom website. Interestingly, despite limited investment in online website and logistics, almost 65% of their business is now online. Online sales have significantly increased since Office Storeroom went online in 2013. However, during the same time-frame sales at retail outlets have declined.

Overall, sales at Office Storeroom have been declining for the past 3 years. Sales figures for the past 5 years are shown in the table below.

Year	Sales
2013	$1,094,398.00
2014	$1,987, 213.00
2015	$1,772,973.00
2016	$1,436,392.00
2017	$1,073,924.00

Table 1: Sales Figures

As the new head of sales (Ben joined in year 2017) at Office Storeroom, Ben is responsible for improving the sales of office supplies. During the meeting Ben explains that he knows it is his job to improve sales but he is unsure how to do this. He has asked for your help to conduct some research to help make some informed decisions about how to improve sales.

1. Develop research question(s) that address the concerns outlined in the above scenario.
2. What secondary data sources might be used to help answer the research question(s)?
3. Selection of primary data collection method(s): What primary data collection method(s) can you use to help develop some recommendations for Ben? Justify your chosen method(s).
4. Selection of sampling technique: Ben wants you to get staff opinions about the decline in sales. How will you obtain the sample? Justify your sampling design.
5. What ethical principles you should follow when conducting this research?
6. Identify limitations in the research design you described in Q3 (relating to data collection) and/or Q4 (relating to sampling).

Answer 1

Research questions for the scenario are as follows -

How much is the market share of the company in online market

How much is the market share of the company in offline market

How much is the growth for office supplies market in Autrailia overall

Data sources than can be used to answer the above questions are -

- Market share data

- Market growth data

Since we are unaware of the underlying problem behind decrease in sales, we would like to have a focus group interview to allign on the problem.

We will select some staff members randomly from all staff members. The technique is called simple random sampling. The sample size should be more than 10.

The principle of ethics involve -

- Anonymity/confidentiality of research participants

- Avoid any sort of cheating/deceptive practises

Limitations in research design -

The results from the primary data sources are tend to be biased if not controlled for factors effecting the participant's tendency to give right answers.

The simple random sampling is best suited when we have a population of enormous size from where we want to survey a small sample