Thursday, February 9th, I officially collected all 50 participants I needed for my blind consumption test and entered in the results into my Google Sheet - woohoo! Other than that, I have been working on improving and seriously cutting down on my lit review and methods (after improvements, those two sections were up to around 3850 words 0.0 - but I have cut down to around 3400 and foresee myself getting a few hundred more out by tomorrow). I also wrote my abstract, which I have put at the top of my blog (the white paragraph) to help people new to my research understand what I was aiming to find and the results of my research.
Speaking of the results, let's look at what I ultimately found...
After I finished plotting each participant's natural product movement influence score with her mismatch score (measuring how different her blind consumption lip gloss brand preferences were from her self-identified brand preferences), I used excel to find the equation of the line of best fit and the R-squared value for the linear regression. The R-squared value turned out to be 0.01639, indicating that there is not even close to a linear relationship between participants' natural product movement influence and mismatch scores. The lack of relationship is also supported by the seemingly nonexistent trend visually represented by the scatter. Thus, I concluded that the natural product movement is by no means a sole or primary influence in forming consumer opinions and influencing consumer decision making in the makeup market, as participants more often than not had high mismatch scores (6 or 8) regardless of their natural product movement influence scores. Therefore, as indicated by the high mismatch scores across the board, the results suggest that makeup consumers make decisions predominantly based on their emotional perceptions of certain brands, as opposed to actual sensed quality differences between makeup products, but these emotional perceptions are by no means solely related to the natural product movement and are likely due to many other factors.
You are probably wondering which of the 4 lip gloss brands actually scored the highest or was the favorite among participants in the blind consumption test. Honestly, the rankings were all over the place and there was no one brand that clearly seemed to be ranked higher than the others. In order to analyze the rankings as a whole, I went through each participant's rankings in the blind consumption test for each brand. If the brand was ranked the participant's favorite, I gave the brand a +3; if the brand was the second favorite, a +2; and if the third favorite, a +1). After going through all the participants and brands, (*key drumroll*), I found that L'oreal (the UNNATURAL DRUGSTORE brand) won out with a score of 105, with bareMinerals (the natural high-end brand) in second place at 90, Burt's Bees (the natural drugstore brand) in third at 70, and MAC (the high-end unnatural brand) finishing last with a score of 64. Thus, it also cannot be concluded that natural makeup is inherently higher quality than unnatural makeup, as L'oreal was the overall favorite. Also interesting, high end makeup is not inherently higher quality than drugstore makeup, as L'oreal won over bareMinerals and MAC came in last place.
Going forward this week, I am actually going to start writing my results section, which will include all of the above findings and also specifically analyze the participants with the very high and very low natural product influence scores. Interestingly enough, some of the participants with the highest natural product influence scores of 15-20 actually said that they preferred to purchase the unnatural makeup brands over the natural ones in their self-identified brand preferences. Thus, while participants may claim that they subscribe the natural product movement, they may not actually associate each brand with whether or not it uses natural or unnatural ingredients. I will delve more into this next week once I have looked more closely at a few specific examples.
Anyways, thanks for reading through my blog this week! Let me know if you have any questions or advice. I hope you are all also enjoying your own research and time out of school. :)
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Hey Audrey,
ReplyDeleteWow... it's awesome that you're completely done collecting data! I really enjoyed reading your explanation of your results with the scatterplot -- keep up that kind of explanation when you write your actual results section.
It's interesting that people seemingly cannot tell the difference between unnatural and natural brands when blinded (as seen in the very low correlation coefficient), and actually prefer the unnatural drugstore brand the most. I guess that shows the importance of marketing and branding when selling products!
What potential inferences do you think you can make about the data you collected -- especially regarding why you observed what you did? Did you ask the subjects of your experiment which brand they tend to use? Maybe they preferred the lip gloss they were familiar with, which was L'Oreal? Also, did you talk to some subjects and record some observations? I remember you said you were going to do that... how do you plan to parse/present that data?
Awesome progress!
Yash
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Hi Audrey,
ReplyDeleteIts crazy that you have finished all your data collection right out of the gate. What exact statistical test did you use to get the R2 value? It may help to understand the general statistics behind it. It is interesting that there seems to be no correlation between the mismatch and natural product data. It seems that the makeup people are most used to may be their most preferred. L'Oreal seems to be optimized for comfort. The low R squared seems to be pointing towards a conclusion that humans don't know what they are purchasing. It is great to know we blindly trust name brands.
-Ashwath V.
Hey Audrey! I really look forward to reading your blog posts and this one especially was interesting to read! Who knew that emotional perception played such a large role in influencing our consumer decisions? I like how this project had the purpose of showing consumer choices of makeup, but could probably be extended and generalized for other products, too. The fact the unnatural and cheapest make up was the most popular was really fascinating. It really makes you question if the "quality" of higher end brands are even noticeable. And if companies can get away with making cheaper products with unnatural ingredients without people really noticing a difference in quality, then where is the incentive, outside of environmental reasons and societal pressures, for companies to go the natural route? I agree with Yash that it would be interesting to try to draw some more interesting conclusions from all the data you got. Like did the participants have much experience/knowledge of makeup beforehand? Why do you think BareMinerals got second? Do you think the more expensive ingredients for "natural" makeup causes more of an effect on the product than expensive chemical ingredients for "unnatural" makeup? I think your research is so cool with so many different parts and conclusion that can be drawn, so I'm really excited to see how you end up presenting your results and what conclusions you end up dictating would be the most influential and interesting to the sphere of research. Great job, Audrey!
ReplyDeleteAudrey -- I love the idea of putting your abstract at the top of the blog -- that helps to concisely convey the purpose of your research -- kudos!
ReplyDeleteI also want you to consider the subsections of people that you could highlight in your results, particularly those that highly aligned with the natural products movement and those that were staunchly against the movement. I know we discussed it a little, but having these participants featured would provide more nuance to the results.
Also, discussing how few people identified with the movement could also be an interesting point, as the literature may have overestimated the strength of the movement as a whole and thus you overpredicted its influence.