Quantitative Analysis

 

Adventurous Target Market

Our preconception of the Chinese market was fairly a dull and homogenous preference for Chinese food. Our survey, however, uncovered an adventurous group of people who love trying new types of food and consider themselves adventurous on the food front. As many as 3 out of 4 people consider themselves to be adventurous, and this combined with that only 2 percent said they did not like to try new types of food, creating optimism amongst our researchers. There is also a general willingness to try new food as more than 8 out of 10 answered yes.

 

Majority of our respondents have tried food with chocolate, which we found very interesting since our hypothesis was that very few people had any previous experience with chocolate food. There is a close link between how adventurous people are and those who have tried chocolate food before, as the mean is 6.3 and 5.4 respectively, on a 1-7 scale on how adventurous you are on trying new food, for those who said yes and no to having tried chocolate food.

 

Taste Preference

Half of the respondents answered that they prefer sweet tasting chocolate, with about one third saying neutral chocolate. Bitter comes in third with 13 percent of the answers, while only 2 percent said they did not like chocolate! This was a huge surprise for us because one of our main hypothesis before the qualitative research was that the Chinese people prefer bitter tasting chocolates.

 

The analysis also shows that strong dark chocolate and milk chocolate are the most popular types, while 16 percent also claim that they like all kinds of chocolates.

 

Marketing Efforts

The survey identified two main sources where people look for information about new restaurants and bars; online and through friends, colleagues and family (word of mouth). Together they accounted for more than 80% of our responses. Surprisingly, only 3% answered print media which shows today’s trends. Expats are more inclined to use word of mouth than to look it up online, which fits perfectly with Max Brenner´s strategy. Students equally use word of mouth and online, along with working people.

 

When we looked even deeper we discovered that there was a difference between the channels that people preferred in comparison with their taste preferences. The majority of those who preferred neutral taste would typically find information online, while this does not apply to people who prefer sweet tasting chocolate, which instead have a preference towards word of mouth.

 

Areas

Xintiandi, East Nanjing and Pudong where the three most mentioned areas where people would typically go to eat chocolate desserts, and accounts for almost half of the responses. Since a fair share of the people do not have any idea of the areas, we assumed that people that do know also have a clear opinion on where to go. This should serve as an indication on where we can potentially set up the first Max Brenner. Because if we remove the response of those who do not know we see that Xintiandi, East Nanjing, Pudong and the Bund accounts for 75 percent of all the answers.

 

It was also a surprise that 12% of the sample chose the Bund due to the high quality reputation it has. This is quite mysterious since only 21% of these were tourists. This might be an indication that the chocolate concept is perceived as very high quality by the respondents, which was also something we learnt during our qualitative research. As an interesting note, 86% of those who said the Bund were male.

 

Among those who said Xintiandi, 96% also said that they like to try new foods. This might indicate that people who go to Xintiandi are more inclined to try new foods. 62% of those who said Xintiandi were students, which interestingly fits our target market.

 

Concept

51% of our respondents welcomed the Bar concept more than the others, while the restaurant received almost one third of the responses. Like we mentioned above, whatever area we decide on will also impact what the respondents prefer and should be taken into consideration. Worryingly, only 11 percent found the online concept most appealing, which we expected to be higher before starting our survey.

 

Occasion is an important factor for people, and the majority of people say the do not need a special occasion to go out and eat chocolate desserts, whereas 29 percent would go for a special occasion like for example a birthday.

 

An interesting finding is that females are much more inclined to like the Bar concept compared to male (60% vs 45%), while male lean more towards the restaurant concept.