CONSULTANTS

PRIMARY RESEARCH
The purpose of primary research was to understand why USD students are
not attending football and basketball games. The consumer group is made up of
undergraduate USD students. To learn about our consumer group we conducted a
survey, focus group, and personal interviews. The survey was given to 526 students,
but two were thrown out due to incompletion, which leaves us with 524 surveys. The
sampling was convenience sampling due to the fact we distributed to students on the
USD campus and no attempt was made to randomly sample. The distribution of sex
was 62.8% female and 37.2% male with a majority of the student’s major being in the
College of Arts & Sciences. Therefore our selection of students accurately represented
the University of South Dakota in those categories. We gathered primarily junior
undergraduates who made up 28% of our data. Sophomore undergraduates were
The results were collected and we created our own datasheet in Microsoft Excel for
the answers that included qualitative data, we utilized a pre-made codebook for the
quantitative and qualitative data. A color coding system was used to code for the
qualitative data to make analyzing the data easier. A copy of the survey and codebook
can be found in Appendix A. The survey led us to discover that students did not attend
due to: a lack of team spirit, an unsuccessful team record, work, a lack of interest in
among the crowd.
To understand how to motivate students to attend games we held a focus group
consisting of ten undergraduate students. The focus group was held the Al Neuharth
Media Center on the USD campus. All the students sat in a circle and while one member
of our group was the leader who prompted questions for the participants to answer. The
remaining members of the group then took notes and observed the participants and in
addition one group member recorded the participants with a camera. The focus group is
purposive sampling because we selected participants to attend, and what topics would
be discussed. The topic/questions for our focus group can be found in Appendix B.
After discussing reasons why students did not attend football or basketball games, they
were asked what would motivate them to attend. We found the following as potential
motivators: improve the tailgate experience, change the student ticket distribution,
increase the school spirit among students with pep rallies and more Charlie Coyote, and
We wanted to know more how well the paw points system was working; therefore
we conducted 10 personal interviews with students who used the new system. We
selected ten students, of various grades and majors, who all had accumulated enough
paw points to be in the top ten for most paw points. We conducted these interviews via
email and we concluded the following results from their responses. The questions for
the personal interviews can be found in Appendix C. The most important information
we concluded from these personal interviews were as follows: develop a new marketing
strategy for paw points, redesign the prize pick-up method, and improve the prize
selection.
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