Customer perceptions of a brand of graphic paper in Britain and Germany

An internationally active manufacturer of graphic paper contacted PMR about the possibility of conducting research about one of its brands.

Aim of quantitative-qualitative study

A few months earlier the company had completed a rebrand of one of its flagship ranges of printer and copy paper. It involved a number of changes, including in the way the product was packaged. The PMR Client wanted to find out how these changes had affected perceptions of the products among customers in Germany and Great Britain.

RESEARCH METHOD

The project team decided to employ content analysis. A corpus of online comments and reviews posted by consumers in the two countries who had bought the client’s product on the internet was collected and subjected to a quantitative and qualitative examination. Three types of websites were taken into account in building the corpus: distributors’ websites, online stores selling stationery and office supplies, and large e-commerce platforms such as amazon.com or eBay. We were able to establish the following in the course of our analysis:

• strong points and weak points of six different papers from the product range in question,
• perceptions of the products among consumers in Britain and Germany,
• general customer satisfaction with the products,
• compatibility of the papers with printers and copiers from different manufacturers and brands,
• key areas for product modification identified by users,
• main differences in customer perceptions of the client’s products and rival products.

Result of PMR study

A detailed research report was prepared and presented to the client, together with the corpus of online comments from Britain and Germany that we had collected and analysed. The report discussed issues of particular interest and import to the client, such as the best and worst rated attributes of its products, perceptions of the products, general customer satisfaction with the products, synergies between the papers and printer types, and possible areas for product improvement. After going over the findings, the client asked us to expand our study design to analyse more issues.