The first essential thing when doing a research is to understand its goal. Based on that, the most appropriate research method should be selected for the project. As in this case, the main purpose is to examine the consumers behaviors towards blogging; therefore, the qualitative research is chosen as it is proved to have links to our research target. On the other hand, the quantitative
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methods can provide the researchers the statistical techniques and other logical approach related. It is possible to have a combination of these two methods to both describe details and determine variance as well. (Silverman 2005, pp. 6-8.) 5.2 Qualitative and quantitative research
According to Merriam (2014), a qualitative research is considered the most suitable method for collecting and analyzing data. This method focuses on context meaning and underlying meaning when collecting and interpreting the data. Human is the most appropriate target for qualitative method since its central research activities are interviewing, observing and analyzing. Rather than determining the reason and result, it is important to understand how people interpret their experiences, their feelings and their insightful thoughts. (Merriam 2014, pp. 2-5.)
In this study, the qualitative research method is adopted by using a discussion topic to collect opinions towards bloggers from the users of the forum. The topic is opened in webtretho.com, one of the biggest forums for women in Vietnam.
Together with the knowledge gaining from the author’s observation from previous related topic on webtretho.com “Must-Know Beauty Bloggers”
(Vyle410 2015) as well as from people around, this discussion contributes to explore more about how people feels in details since they can speak more openly compared to the structured research method.
The second research method is quantitative research, which is more about logical, statistical and numeral point of view. Besides the consumers’ feelings, it is of great importance to know the percentage or the number of consumers that have various behaviors towards bloggers. It is also necessary to understand the variances between different groups of consumers’ opinions. The quantitative method is useful to indicate the connection between numerical interpretation and empirical examination. In general, quantitative research is mainly used in economics, marketing, psychology and in political science. (British Library n.d.) The quantitative research used in this thesis is in form of a survey with a questionnaire of 15 questions including both open ended and close ended ones.
39 5.3 SPSS
In this thesis both the qualitative and the quantitative methods have been chosen since it is about understanding and exploring the blogging phenomenon but also to understand how the consumers feels towards the bloggers, which is indicated from the figures. In order to have a deep understanding and an intensive analysis for the results, it is crucial to utilize both research methods.
The results will be coded with SPSS and presented with frequency table and graphs, which gives the research a quantitative feature and the reader a better overview of the problem.
SPSS, standing for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is a software program normally used in quantitative investigations by social scientists. SPSS software is useful in statistics performance, such as:
descriptive statistics: frequencies, descriptive and descriptive ratio statistics
bivariate statistics: t-tests, ANOVA and correlation
numerical outcome prediction: linear regression and logistic regression
identifying groups: cluster analysis, factor analysis and discriminant scaling (Chen 2012, p. 9)
This research makes use of SPSS’s functions, which consist of organizing data, collecting and demonstrating descriptive statistics to analyze and portray the results indicated from those data (Wetcher-Hendricks 2014).
5.3.1 The survey
The survey was created as a web based questionnaire. The respondents can answer the survey easily by following a link that led to the website. The link was posted on Webtretho forum – the biggest forum for Vietnamese women, and other Facebook beauty groups in Vietnam which were Changmakeup and Fierybread. The period of time for the questionnaire was one month from 3 February 2016 to 3 March 2016. Those pages are operated by high profile bloggers who have hundreds of thousands followers, which can add the ability of catching more attention for response rate. Five high viewed bloggers were contacted to help with sharing the survey links on their blogs, but unfortunately no one responded. The questionnaire can be done by anyone who clicks the
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links, but the main target group of respondents is women who are interested in reading beauty blogs and have some insight and opinions about the world of blogs. The targeted respondents expected were mentioned in front of the survey link when posted.
5.3.2 The survey questions
The questionnaire consisted of 15 questions and there are three questions about the background of the respondents including age, occupation and gender.
The questionnaire was designed in a way that almost every question required an answer. Two of the questions (Q.6 and Q.14) are open ended form which requires the respondents to write about their thoughts. There are 13 close ended questions which enable the respondents choose from ready given answers. There is one question not required to answer if the respondents do not follow any blogger at the moment (Q.6).
The questionnaire was written in Vietnamese. It received 106 responses in one month; with 105/106 valid responses which had all the required questions answered.
Here is the list of questions used.
Hello. I am a last year student of Saimaa University of Applied Sciences and I am making a survey of the influence of the bloggers on Vietnamese young consumers’ behavior. I will be so grateful if you can spend 3 minutes to help me to answer this questionnaire. All your answers will be very useful for my upcoming thesis. Thank you so much: X
1. Hello. How old are you?
☐15-18 years old
☐19-24 years old
☐>24 years old
2. What is your gender?
☐Male
☐Female
41 3. What is your occupation?
☐Student
☐Office worker
☐Other employed
4. Do you read product reviews? If yes, how often?
☐Always
☐Sometimes
☐Rarely
☐Never
5. Do you follow any beauty bloggers?
☐Yes
☐No
6. If yes, please list your top 5 favorite bloggers?
7. When there is a release of new products, do you read reviews from bloggers about them?
☐Yes
☐No
8. Have you ever bought any beauty products after reading reviews from bloggers?
☐Yes, I have.
☐No, I haven’t.
9. How can bloggers have influence on you?
☐Not at all
☐Less influent
☐Influent
☐Completely influent
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10. Which platform of the bloggers you usually read? (Multiple options)
☐Youtube
☐Personal blog
☐Other, which is...
11. Rank the trust you have for: (from 1-5 , 1- least, 5- most) Beauty
Beauty magazines
Traditional advertising methods
12. Which blog content makes you most interested in?
☐Product reviews
☐Makeup challenge
☐Q&A from bloggers
☐Giveaway
☐Other, which is...
13. Rank the importance of bloggers in your opinion.(from 1-5, 1-least, 5-most)
14. Any drawbacks of bloggers at the moment? (Open question)
15. How do you think of cooperation of bloggers and brands in marketing?
☐Not agree
☐Ok
☐Completely agree
Original survey link: https://surveyplanet.com/56b1658e7ded0a752f3fbd07 (in Vietnamese)
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6 Results analysis and conclusion
6.1 Result analysis
This part presents the results of the empirical research and the conclusions that can be withdrawn from them. It is crucial to be aware that the purpose of the survey was to find out how consumers buying behaviours were affected by beauty bloggers. In addition, the aim included examining further behaviors such as the benefits of blogs over other platforms, the reasons why readers follow blogs and what makes them keep returning to the same blogs, which were discussed in the forum topic.
6.1.1 Targeted consumer group
As discussed in the previous chapter the qualitative data was collected from 105 participants in the form of a questionnaire. All the respondents were Vietnamese people and were asked questions that would reflect their buying habits to their making use of blogs.
The first three questions are concentrated on background factors of the respondents, collecting personal information that may help in further data analysis. These questions included age, current occupation and gender of the consumers. The results can be seen in Table 3, Graph 3 and 4 below, which were analyzed by SPSS.
Consumer's age * Consumer's occupation Crosstabulation
Count
Consumer's occupation
Total Student Office worker Other employed
Consumer's age 15 to 18 19 2 1 22
19 to 24 46 18 9 73
>24 4 3 3 10
Total 69 23 13 105
Table 3 Targeted consumers age and occupation
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The author decided to divide age into three groups as shown above. The reasons for this is according to the facts mentioned in the introduction, the major age of the most active internet penetration group is from 15 to 24 (Evans 2015). Besides, from 15 to 18 years old, the consumers at that age are mainly students who have first steps into beauty products such as basic essentials.
The second group is 19-24 years old, which concludes students and people who are able to work and have extra allowance already. The last group is mature people who are working and may require higher quality in products as they may afford to them.
Graph 3 Respondents' age
45 Graph 4 Respondents' occupations
As can be seen from table 3 and graphs 3 and 4, the respondents’ major age group was between 19 and 24 years old. 87.61% of 105 respondents were either students who still were in progress of studying or office workers who had their own job. It could be briefly understood that at this age, consumers have enough knowledge and condition to approach more to Internet in general and blogs in particular.
The Graph 5 below portrays the results for the background question “What is your gender?” which is contributed to clarify the major gender for targeted consumer segmentation.
46 Graph 5 Respondents' gender
The result indicates that most of the respondents who have interest in blogs are female, which accounts for 86.67% of all the 105 survey participants.
Therefore, based on the output of the first three questions, it can be concluded that the major group of potential consumers who are keen of blogging are women between 19 to 24 years old and either students or office workers being educated.
6.1.2 Blogging behavior
Question 4. Do you read reviews of products? If yes, how often?
Question 4 reflects the pre-purchase behavior of those consumers. Nearly half of the respondents admitted that they have a habit of reading product reviews very often. The exact numbers of this active group is 49 people, while the total of consumers who selected the “sometimes” option turned out to be rather similar with 45 respondents. Only 11 out of 105 respondents show their being not interested in blogging at all.
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The next three questions dealt with bloggers subscription of the consumers.
Question 5.Do you follow any beauty bloggers?
Question 6. If yes, please list your top 5 favorite bloggers?
Question 7. When there is a release of new products, do you read reviews from bloggers about them?
There were 79 respondents saying yes when being asked if she or he is following any bloggers or not. The non-subscribers made up for roughly one fourth of the total responses. The platforms where readers usually read reviews of bloggers from were revealed in the following table.
Responses 30% of the total answers. Participants also have found beauty bloggers through other social media platforms when Facebook, Personal blog and Instagram followed respectively with 28%, 22% and 18.9%. There were 2 other answers which mentioned the review parts in online retailer websites. It can be indicated that Vietnamese consumers nowadays prefer watching video blog than just simply reading words. The reasons for this can be understood since YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, trumped only by Google so far (ebizmba 2016). Together with the rapidly growing online audiences of vlogging, or video blogging, most of the bloggers in Vietnam these days tend to be vloggers as well due to two causes. The first one is the sponsor cosmetics
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companies make use of these YouTube vloggers to advertise their brands.
Another reason, which contributes greatly, is that the bloggers can earn huge amounts of money from Youtube if their videos receive a high view from the audiences, basically over 10000 views required. According to the results, it is possible to for beauty bloggers to work in a combination of platforms, not only personal blogs, to make it more convenient for users to find them out and to create greater popularity for themselves. (Nguyen 2015.)
Based on the output figures of the survey, the top five favorite bloggers shown in the result are ranked as follow:
1. Love at first shine (https://www.youtube.com/user/loveat1stshinetv), (http://www.loveat1stshine.com/)
2. Changmakeup (https://www.youtube.com/user/TrangTracy), (http://www.changmakeup.com/blog/)
3. Michelle Phan (https://www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan), (http://michellephan.com/)
4. NhiNgo (https://theskincarejunkie.wordpress.com/) and Trinh Pham (https://www.youtube.com/user/trinhtrontrinh)
5. PrettyMuch (https://www.youtube.com/user/PrettyMuchChannel) (http://www.prettymuch.vn/)
The Graph 6 below shows the figures of votes for top most read bloggers. Other bloggers mentioned are Pretty Much, Chieclavotinh, GG Reviews, etc. The figure is counted out of 105 repondents
49 Graph 6 Top favorite bloggers
As it can be seen from the graph 6, Love at first shine was the most popular blogger with the votes of 38/105. The second and third place belonged to Changemakeup and Michelle Phan with 36 and 30 votes respectively. NhiNgo and Trinh Pham got the same vote as 21 to be the forth runner. The last blogger in this list was PrettyMuch with 19/ 105 votes.
6.1.3 Purchasing based on blog recommendations
The rest of questions emphasize the role of bloggers in beauty industry nowadays and how they have impact on the consumers. In question 7, the result showed that 82.9% of the total 105 respondents said they would go online to read reviews from beauty bloggers before they made any decision of purchasing a new product. Amongst that, in question 8, 83.8% revealed that they used to buy some products based on the recommendations of the bloggers. The Graph 7 and Graph 8 below give a clearer illustration on how beauty bloggers affect the consumers purchasing decision.
36 38
30
21 21 19
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Top favorites bloggers
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Graph 7 Purchasing decisions based on blog reviews
Graph 8 How are consumers affected by bloggers' opinions?
According to the result of question 9, the major of respondents did read bloggers’ recommendations when make purchasing decisions, constituting for 88/105 people being affected. This question helped to understand whether the
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readers actually use blogs as a source of information before they go purchasing product from stores.
It can be referred that all participants have a fairly positive outlook on the bloggers’ recommendations and they tend to rely on blogs for buying-related socializing. Reviews from the bloggers may reduce the readers’ hesitation when purchasing products, especially if the brand they intended to buy is a new one for them.
In the question 10, concerning the most attention catching blog content, not surprisingly, reviews of products came first with 69 choices from 105 respondents. Other specific contents referred are trial product give away, Q&A for bloggers and readers interaction, make up challenges, etc.
6.1.4 Importance of bloggers
Another important aim of the research was to understand what inspires consumers to not only use blogs as a source of information while purchasing products, but also to find out to what extent and why they rely on that source.
When being asked in question 11 to score from 1-5 for the trust of beauty bloggers compared to other sources including beauty magazines and other advertising methods (such as TV ads, radio, websites), beauty bloggers received the highest average score of 3.5 from the respondents. Beauty magazines were the second runner with result of 2.57/5, while other methods had the lowest rank since its average point was only 1.79.
Turning to the importance of beauty bloggers towards the needs of beauty guiding and purchasing for Vietnamese consumers nowadays, respondents were asked to rate the bloggers with a number between 1 and 5 (question 13), where 1 would indicate not useful in buying situations, and where 5 would indicate they saw bloggers as a very useful tool when purchasing products.
Then the final score of the bloggers’ role was quite similarly with 3.58/5 in average. The lowest rate was 2 and the highest was the maximum 5. No lowest point, meaning 1, was given. It could be indicated that even there were some non-blog-reading respondents; they still considered the role of bloggers more or
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less important, not totally unhelpful. Since there were active and inactive blog readers in the total respondents, this answer could be expected. It is a surprise when none of them had seen blogs as a useless tool.
6.1.5 Drawbacks of beauty bloggers
Question 14. Any drawbacks of bloggers at the moment? (Open question) When investigating in the field of beauty bloggers disadvantages, the most considerable issue reflected by the respondents is some dishonest reviews of bloggers for sponsored products. In that case, the blogger may receive money or free products from the company to write for product introduction. Even though some bloggers do mention if the products are sponsored or not and states that their reviews are still neutral, it still causes suspicion for readers about the honesty of review. According to the result of the survey, 26/45 opinions of bloggers’ drawbacks are all about the sponsor bias products and feel of advertising in reviews.
“Sponsored items can be bias.”
“Famous bloggers working for beauty magazines often do PR more than give a neutral review.”
“Beauty bloggers should see themselves as a normal user before giving review to any product, to get rid of the advertising feeling.”
“They only use sponsored products so their reviews are not trustworthy.”
“Sponsored; liars.”
Some of the sharing from the respondents pointed out the major problem of beauty bloggers these days which is their honesty in review and PR in their works. Other issues mentioned are the quality of the video and the blog content.
The audience is requiring more intensive writings and more interaction between the bloggers and followers.
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6.1.6 How do customers react to the marketing activities using bloggers?
On question 15, the participants were asked to give opinions about the cooperation between bloggers and beauty brand. Most of the respondents (94/105) showed their agreement for the co-working. The minor disagree opinions is believed to be a sequence of the major drawbacks discussed above.
Frequency Percent
Valid disagree 24 22,9
agree 70 66,7
absolutely agree 11 10,5
Total 105 100,0
Table 5 How do you think about cooperation between bloggers and beauty brand
Another issue was raised in webtretho discussion forum, is “Why do consumers follow beauty bloggers and what makes them keep coming back to a blog?”
As the results in the figure above indicate, the participants all saw some benefits to using bloggers in the shopping situation. More intensive reasons of why consumers read blogs as a part of purchasing process were analyzed from the topic in forum Webtretho.
“NhiNgo share all the advanced skincare knowledge in the simple and understandable way. Besides, she uses reasonable price products, which is suitable for students and office workers.” (hii_lovemoney)
“Really useful and knowledgeable. They truly contribute for the beauty community rather than selling themselves for money of sponsor like what beauty magazines do.” (miu_le89)
As can be indicated from most of the opinions expressed in the topic, the major reason that attracts readers and keeps them return is the quality of the blog content. Showing good knowledge of skincare, non-PR feeling and nice pictures/ videos are listed as the best attractive points in the eyes of readers.