Determining Consumer Behaviour in the Catering Industry: A Case Study Of Starbucks UK

Due to the high supply on the market, companies have to investigate and understand customer needs in order to adapt their products or services and to be competitive within the highly rival market. It is also crucial to avoid any unethical behaviour, as this may lead to retrogressive turnover.
This book focuses on the investigation of factors which determine consumer behaviour within the catering industry. To concretise this extensive area, this work will concentrate on Starbucks’ tax avoidance in the United Kingdom in December 2012.
As there are no relevant or current reports on Starbucks’ tax avoidance and customer behaviour, the primary research on this issue will be done in this work. However, the literature review provides a comprehensive overview of relevant landmark studies of customer satisfaction and previous research on customer behaviour within the catering industry.
By means of a self-provided conceptual framework and an appropriate methodology a quantitative online questionnaire was created and implemented.

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Chapter 3.4 Primary Data Collection Process:
According to Flick (2011), advantage of quantitative research is that it is possible to investigate a higher number of cases within short time given and the results have a high degree of generalizability. However, the benefits of qualitative research is the detailed and in-depth analysis, in which "participants have much more freedom to determine what is relevant for them and to present it in ist contexts". In contrast, Kothari (2008) simplify the difference to quantitative research which is based on the measurement of quality, where qualitative research is concerned with qualitative phenomenon.
Going more in detail, Kumar (2010) stated, that questionnaire questions can be concepts or variables, where a variables are measurable and concepts are "mental images or perceptions and therefore their meanings vary markedly from individual to individual".
In this research the variables are gender, age, and place of residence. On the other hand, concepts are the questions about the perception of various quality factors and attitude against Starbuck's tax avoidance.
Using a pilot test a questionnaire can be verified for weaknesses and errors, which will be improved before the implementation (Kothari 2008). Furthermore, Saunders and Lewis (2012) highlighted, that a pilot test will avoid disappointments within the current data collection. The accomplished pilot test for this research will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
As Flick (2011) mentioned in his work, a new trend on doing research has arisen: 'online research', which brings new opportunities as well as challenges. The most evident advantages for using online questionnaires are costs, time, as well as the absence of geographical and temporal boundaries (Wright 2005).
Skiadas (2009) supplemented the advantage list by identifying the major advantage that "results are collated by the programme used so that the researcher can immediately start to analyse the findings after the data collection phase. Additional advantage is the evidence to say "online questionnaires obtain a higher number of respondents than paper based questionnaires"(ibid).
For this research an online questionnaire has been created to collect primary quantitative data. By using www.q-set.cu.uk, a free online survey website, 9 concept and variables questions were prepared; one of them is an open question.
3.4.1 Sampling:
The questionnaire was spread online by using social media as a prime source. To be able to focus on London and to ensure collecting random samples only, the link to the questionnaire were placed on London's specific Facebook groups, like 'London City' or 'Germans living in London', which has between 1,000 and 15,000 members, trying to get as many completed questionnaires returned as possible.
Random sampling is according to Oakshott (2012) a method where every single participant of the target population has an equal chance of being selected. This sampling strategy will be used in this research, to make sure not to manipulate the findings.
After the collection, there are different options to analyse the data. A common method is to use Excel, which also produce immediately changeable, professional charts.
Another option is SPSS which is used analysing the findings in this research as this programme provide statistical packages (Oakshott 2012) and is possibly the most widely used computer software for the analysis of quantitative data within business research (Bryman and Bell 2011).
SPSS will be used in this research as it is a more appropriate method with statistical packages.
3.5 Validity:
'Validity is the extent to which the research findings reflect the phenomena under study' (Collis and Hussey 2009 p. 64). Being more specific, Saunders and Lewis (2012), describes that "validity is concerned with whether the findings are really about what they appear to be about or not". Validity is about promising what exactly the re