QUESTIONS & ACTIVITIES

1. What is a destination brand?   Why is it important for 7-Eleven Australia to have a destination brand such as Slurpee?

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES

1.  Brainfreeze Focus groups

Focus groups are a key part of market research campaigns and are ideal way to obtain direct product feedback from a target demographic.

• Working in groups you are required to assemble focus groups from younger members of your school community, perhaps Year 7s or 8s.

• After obtaining the relevant permission organise an appropriate time and location to work with these students.  Make the venue more interesting, have music playing in the background, perhaps have a laptop ready and so on.

• Approach your local 7-Eleven, explain what you are doing and see if you can obtain a voucher to provide free Slurpees and if possible; other products for your focus group.  (If not you will have to supply these yourself)

• Prepare a set of questions to find out how your focus group feels about Slurpee, 7-Eleven and consumer culture in general.  You will need to be very prepared and have someone in the group record the information.  Group members will need to have specific roles.  At the very least you might need 2 facilitators (good communicators), a product wrangler (a good organiser) and a recorder (with good attention to detail). You might be able to video the sessions.

Some possible things to find out are:

• What they like

• What they don’t like?

• How much money they have to spend?

• Why and when they go to 7-Eleven?

• What they think of special promotions, etc.?

• Which products they like consuming together?

• Taste tests and product comparisons.

• What they think is currently cool or in and so on?

Prepare and give a report to your class that summarises the findings.  Use visual aids and multimedia to enliven your presentation.  Invite your local 7-Eleven owner/manager to the presentation.