Marketing research for expanding a business online : Case Uulatuote

The purpose of the thesis was to find out if an expansion of business, in the form of a web shop would be profitable for the case company, Uulatuote. Uulatuote is a Finnish family business specializing in selling traditional and environmentally friendly paint. The potential business expansion profitability was researched through an online survey, with a sample size of 377 respondents. The purpose was to find out what consumers think about the idea of purchasing paint and painting utensils online, since this kind of a business model is not yet seen in the Finnish markets. The purpose was also to find out what the consumers needs and biggest problems were regarding paint purchasing. The survey was sent out through the case company’s Facebook page, which consisted of more than 5000 followers, in order to reach people who already knew the company and were interested in the product or had used it before. Using the Facebook page follower base also enabled the author to gather answers from the actual target group of the case company, rather than a random sample of Finnish people, which gave a more reliable overall result, since the respondents could potentially be future users of the web shop. The data was collected through a survey made with Google Forms and analysed by us-ing graphs to illustrate the results in a clear and visual way. The research results indicated that there definitely is an interest towards an online shop, which would satisfy different needs. From the results, it could be clearly seen that consumers do not feel hundred percent comfortable ordering paint products online, since majority expressed their need for help in different areas when doing a purchase. The next step for the case company is to further plan if a web shop could answer to these obstacles. The conclusions are further discussed in the last part of the thesis