Don’t discount
student shoppers

CMU senior researches
buyer behavior

Katie Wale stood in line at a very busy Mount Pleasant discount store and thought: Why are so many CMU students here? Thinking back to a marketing class she had taken on buyer behavior, she decided to survey students about their shopping habits regarding K-Mart, Meijer, Target, and Wal-Mart.

“We have four national discount store chains, all within five miles of each other,” said Wale, a Royal Oak senior majoring in logistics management and marketing. “At one point Mount Pleasant was the only place in the country with so many discount stores so close together. How do students choose which one to shop at?”

Wale displayed the results of her senior Honors research project at the 2007 Student Research and Creative Endeavors Exhibition in April. Her project, Regression Analysis of Central Michigan University Students’ Intentions to Visit Mount Pleasant Discount Stores, evaluated how well the competitors in the discount store category were doing with Central Michigan University students. Richard Divine, marketing department chair, aided her.

She also wanted to determine the underlying causes of the businesses’ successes and failures and to identify the key drivers behind students’ preferences and intentions.

Wale handed out 122 surveys to a random sampling of undergraduate classes, including a biology, an English, and a logistics class. On the survey, which was conducted in spring 2006, students numbered the discount chains based on preference and where they actually shopped most often.

She found that the males preferred Meijer because of the sports selection and females preferred Target because of the higher brand quality image. “But what surprised me is that even though the women chose Target as their favorite, when it came to where they shopped the most it was Meijer because it has both groceries and merchandise,” Wale said.