The Shell Oil Company, which began about 1912, had been for decades a household

Question

The Shell Oil Company, which began about 1912, had been for decades a household name as a quality oil company in the United States. However, by the late 1970s much of its prestige as a premiere company had disappeared. How could Shell regain its high status? In the 1990s, Shell undertook an extensive research effort to find out what it needed to do to improve its image. As a first step, Shell hired Responsive Research and the Opinion Research Corporation to conduct a series of focus groups and personal interviews among various segments of the population. Included in these were youths, minorities, residents in neighborhoods near Shell plants, legislators, academics, and present and past employees of Shell. The researchers learned that people believe that top companies are integral parts of the communities in which the companies are located rather than separate entities. These studies and others led to the development of materials that Shell used to explain their core values to the general public. Next, PERT Survey Research ran a large quantitative study to determine which values were best received by the target audience. Social issues emerged as the theme with the most support. During the next few months, the advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather, hired by Shell, developed several campaigns with social themes. Two market research companies were hired to evaluate the receptiveness of the various campaigns. The result was the “Count on Shell” campaign, which featured safety messages with useful information about what to do in various dangerous situations. A public “Count on Shell” campaign was launched in February 1998 and met with considerable success: the ability to recall Shell advertising jumped from 20% to 32% among opinion influencers, and more than 1 million copies of Shell's free safety brochures were distributed. By promoting itself as a reliable company that cares, Shell seems to be regaining its premiere status. Today, Shell initiates and supports several programs in which the company and employees are involved in community and civic activities. These programs range from local improvement projects to fundraising events for regional nonprofit organizations. According to company sources, “every year, more than 1,500 Shell employees, retirees and their family members contribute, on average, more than 40,000 hours for company-sponsored volunteer initiatives nationwide” in the United States. Some of these include America's WETLAND Campaign, Shell's Workforce Development Initiative, and United Way campaigns. Shell U.S. has been a strong supporter of the Points of Light Foundation; and each fall, Shell volunteers participate in the cleaning of beaches in Texas, Louisiana, and California. In addition, Shell sponsors the Shell Houston Open PGA golf tournament, which has raised $50 million since 1974 for various children's charity organizations.

7.2 It appears that at least one of the research companies hired by Shell used some stratification in their sampling. What are some of the variables on which they are stratified? If you were truly interested in ascertaining opinions from a variety of segments of the population with regard to opinions on “premiere” companies or about Shell, what strata might make sense? Name at least five and justify why you would include them

Explanation / Answer

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Introduction:
The problem in hand is a proper market research problem, i.e. the company (Shell) want to investigate and conclude on the reason which has led to a downfall in popularity of the company name among its customers and the community in general. We need to carry out a survey which clearly brings out the reason ans solution to the problem.

Sample Survey: Lets first define some of the basic parameters related to this survey:

Population: The population targeted in this survey is the entire US population which earlier was very fond and acceptive of Shell but the fondness has decreased over time.

Sampling frame: The subset of the population from which we will draw the sample, all possible customers of Shell during its golden hours. This includes all users of Shell products - every citizen who drives on Shell engine oil or uses Shell products in their firms/home,etc.

Answer to the problem:

Stratification: When we want to collect opinion from Shell customers we must be careful to include opinion from every possible quarter of customers. Keeping this in mind, the reaserch companies might have stratified the sampling frame into the following strata:

1. Stratification based on Age: This is usually the most beneficial of all stratification possible. Every company always wants to know its acceptibility about different generations. Some old citizens who have Shell in its golden days will possibly still stick with Shell but not a younger generation who sees Shell just like any other Oil company. So to get an unbiased idea of customer's acceptance of Shell, we need to collect sample from different age groups. Possibly the weighting on the younger groups need to be more because they are the future and Shell need to target them as potential customers.

2. Startification based on Customer segment: To generate an overall idea of the rating of Shell samples need to collected from different customer segments - e.g. Shell products being used in other industries (Industry owners and Workers), Sheel used as Car engine oil (Taxi drivers and sel-driven car owners who drive almost regularly) and so on.

3. Stratification based on locality: If the presence of Shell industry/ refinery in the locaity reduces the price of the product and increases availability then its expected that customers from the locality will be more acceptive of Shell, so we must include customers based on their locality having good/fair/low supply of Shell products.

4. Stratification based on proffession: Customers mindset change completely based on proffession. And here we should be very careful to include all paths of life - from self-employed, homemaker, housewife,proffessional,doctors,engineers,students,teachers,office goer,etc. This will give an overall idea as to how Shell is associated with different walks of life.

5. Stratification based on Race and Minority : This is a very sensitive stratification and hence needs to be surveyed with care. Often the acceptability of a firm varies with the section of community - different race or different community. If Shell is seeing attending to smaller cections of the society via various social programmes it influences the entire community to be very acceptive of the company.

So theses are very simple yet effective stratification possible to carry out the survey.

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