Based on this information, we feel that we will be able to gain a competitive advantage by increasing awareness through proper advertising. Please refer to Appendix C to review the particular responses.
We learned that the Ithaca community would more likely look for information about our company in the Yellow Pages (70% of respondents) and in the newspapers (68% of respondents). We were able to collect additional information about the respondent's activities and interests. Our results showed that most of respondents were interested in movies (70%), travel (58%) and cooking (56%). Based on these figures, we will have the ability to reach our customers through advertising in movie theaters, the Tompkins Regional Airport, and local supermarkets.
Our objective by the end of our first operating year is to obtain a 60% awareness level. If we are able to reach our objective, we will have almost a ten fold awareness level over Time Finders and a significant competitive advantage. We will determine if we are successful or not by a follow-up survey at the end of the fiscal year.
Encouraging Our Target Market to Use Our Service.
Exposure to the benefits of our service will be essential to developing our target market. The vast majority of our potential customers has never used a similar service and, thus, may be hesitant to pay for it for the first time. This hesitation may be detrimental to our initial goal of building our customer base. To overcome this potential drawback, we will include a free trial period to give customers a chance to experience the benefits of our service. To find out how likely customers would use a free trial, we included a question in our survey addressing this subject. The responded with an overwhelmingly higher inclination to use our service if a free trial were involved. In fact, 90% of respondents felt that a free trial period would make them more likely to use our service.