Overview
Parkson, started out in 1987 as a retail and supermarket firm Parkson Holding Berhad. There are around 50 shops in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. The first Parkson in Ho Chi Minh City is the Parkson Saigontourist plaza, opened on June 29th 2005.
Market research
Parkson wants to grasp the customer behavior and there are three methods suggest for doing research: * Using observational research method * Using data from primary gathering * Using 8 focus groups with different segments
Focus group
Focus group usually refers to a group of 10 or fewer volunteered buyers to give their opinion and share their ideas or reactions toward a new product or an idea. They can be asked a number of questions or tried new samples of new products to see how they react toward it.
Benefits: Therefore, the main advantage of focus group method is that it’s easily to measure customer reactions to new products and understand customer perceptions. For example, when a new brand name enter Parkson or replace the old one, we can recognize how people react to that brand name (whether they like it or not) and how their shopping behavior will change (how often customers will shop in that brand).
Another advantage of focus group is encouraging interactions among customers. They can freely discuss and debate more when they’re in a group interviewed than individual. Exchanging information and ideas can make the moderator understand more about their buyers characteristic and their behavior
Disadvantages: However, focus group can have some disadvantages. The first one is that it can cost a big amount of money. To interview a respondent, it will cost around $300. Parkson hold 8 focus groups with different customer segments and each group contains 8 to 10 people. Therefore, it will cost around $19200 to $24000 each time they want to do research.
The second disadvantage is that focus group can’t cover all type customers and maximum depth on a particular issue. Focus group requires their customer to go to a specific place at a specific to have the interview, which make heavy users (Parkson’s loyal customer) are likely to participate in the group discussion. Therefore, Parkson can’t learn about their whole population that they want to aim at. Besides that, some members may not express their true feelings or opinions about what they are asked when their thoughts oppose or differ from the views of others.
The last one is moderator bias. The moderator bias has significant effect on the outcome of a focus group discussion. They may intentionally or unintentionally lead the discussion to inaccurate conclusion by adding in their personal biases into the idea exchange of respondents. Respondents may not be giving honest opinions because they may go against and disappoint the moderator.

Using data from loyalty program
Benefits: Parkson take data directly from its customer loyalty program and explore customer’s purchasing patterns. This method makes use of the database of purchase occasions collected and data taken when customers made enrolment; in other words, they are using internal secondary data. Therefore, their accessibility to the source keeps the cost low and takes less time to collect data.
Furthermore, basing on the frequency of purchase and the data taken from enrolment, Parkson can sort out the target customers to focus their marketing on them. For example, customers with Parkson Privilege card are usually loyal customers (heavy users). According to Parkson(Privilege Card: Parkson, 2012), The Privilege card system pushes customers to making more purchase to accumulate points. The more points customers store up, the more benefits they can get from purchasing. These points can be exchange to vouchers varying from 100.000VND, 500.000VND and 1.000.000VND. With this, Parkson is enforcing the purchase habit of customers, and they are likely to become loyal.
Also, this system can provide which brands are popular to customers; and therefore, Parkson can make adjustment to their marketing strategies. For instance, every now and then, Parkson have discount event (can go up to 50% sale off) for some brands to attract more customers.
Disadvantages: However, using this method has some drawbacks. The data Parkson using is from the privilege card system, which means, for those customers who didn’t register for one, the system cannot provide information of them. As a result, Parkson doesn’t get that part of information.
Another problem is that, the information collected is only from when customers enroll, so after a long time, the data is outdated, the living of customers might change, and this method cannot help predict those changes. Thus, the behaviors might change as well.
Observational research “Observational marketing research is a qualitative method of collecting and analyzing information obtained through directly or indirectly watching and observing others in natural or planned environments” (Wright)
Benefits: The main advantage of observation is that observer can access directly to customers’ natural habit. Other methods such as interview or questionnaire, buyers may not give accurate information. We can actually observe and record what people behave unconsciously while they’re shopping. For instance, we can observe how customers will follow the store layout, how many time does it take them to consider before buying or not buying a product, how customers react to the staffs’ services. In the focus group or personal interview, they may give out answers that are not the same to how they behave in the reality.
Disadvantages: Despite having that advantage, observational research also have some problems. The main disadvantage of observational research is time – consuming and resource intensive. To observe the customer footage, the observers have to sit in front of the CCTV for hours and take notes of customers shopping behavior which can give imprecisely results because observers can’t observe all of the customers. In additional, it’s costly to install a CCTV to observe.
Another disadvantage is that observer will not be subjective when watch the footage of customers – observer bias. They may record what expected to see or what they merely thought they saw because they may prefer one brand name or product than one another.
Conclusion
Using data from loyalty program to do customers research should be the best out of the three methods. It doesn’t cost much and save time as it is using secondary data. The others two methods are time consuming and resource intensive. Other reasons are that the focus group method cannot represent the whole population and the observational method doesn’t have many advantages. On the other hand, the using data from loyalty program provide more advantages and the outdated information can be recollect in later events.

References
Privilege Card: Parkson. (2012). Retrieved March 2014, from Parkson: http://parkson.com.vn/en/introduction.html
Wright. (n.d.). Observational Techniques in Marketing Research. Retrieved March 2014, from Chron: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/observational-techniques-marketing-research-44563.html