Case Study B: Tribute Ltd.

You are a student at the University of Roehampton who has obtained a placement with a small music business called Tribute Ltd. You are keen to do well in this placement as it could lead to a permanent post at the end of your course.
Tribute Ltd specialises in promoting the work of tribute artists and you are going to be attached to a young guitarist and independent artist, Jonnie Jones. Jonnie is a tribute artist of Jimi Hendrix, a famous singer, rock guitarist and song writer from the 1960s who died in 1970. (A tribute artist is someone who impersonates a famous and usually deceased artist).
In his early career, Jimi Hendrix played with the Isley Brothers and Little Richard before hitting the heights of fame head-lining at Woodstock, 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. He won numerous awards for his music and was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame posthumously in 2005. Jimi Hendrix’s music continues to be sold throughout the world.
Although there are many tribute artists who imitate Jimi Hendrix, Jonnie Jones has built a huge reputation in his own right throughout the UK for the quality of his tribute performance. He has a following across the age ranges but especially amongst the senior citizens. Tribute Ltd use nostalgia marketing to promote Jonnie’s own five albums featuring Hendrix’s music and use their website, retail stores around his home town of Brighton and throughout the south east of England. Nevertheless, Tribute Ltd believe that more could be done to increase sales and to enhance his profile across the UK.
Tribute Ltd decide to attach you to Jonnie when he is performing at live gigs, promoting his albums and visiting venues in his hometown, Brighton. They want to know how to market Jonnie better and hence their business; should Jonnie’s music move to a digital format so customers can download songs directly from the internet; should they use YouTube to market his work or consider other outlets for his work? What they really want from you is to provide them with some of your experience of problem solving and business management knowledge.
You have been set a number of tasks which should be presented in report format (word length 2000 excluding graphs/figures/ references) for the management of Tribute Ltd:

Task 1
Using relevant sources of information write a critical analysis of the senior citizen music market and include in your discussion an explanation of nostalgia marketing and whether the internet should play a major role in the marketing of Jonnie’s work in the future. Include a list of references at the end of the report. (15marks)

Task 2
Having gained a better understanding of the senior citizen music market you decide to start analysing Jonnie’s last two years of sales data (2014-2016). Although incomplete Tribute Ltd’s database does provide some basic data including the locations at which his CDs were sold and the contribution to overall profit each method incurred (Table 1). You learn that Jonnie only sells his music in CD format at the present time. You have also discovered that it costs the company £2 per CD to make an album and this includes hire of the recording studio, the cost of a technician and the blank CDs themselves. In terms of sales locations: complimentary indicates there was no charge to the receiver of the CD; General indicates that the CDs were distributed through Jonnie’s personal contacts and friends; mail order is through the post; web order is through the web site; concert performances indicates they were distributed at venues where he was playing live at specific venues (not pubs); retail indicates through record stores.

Table 1: Jonnie Jones sales records for 2014-2016
a) Using an EXCEL spreadsheet complete the above table and include a printout as an appendix to your report. You must also show the formulae behind your columns. (5 marks)
b) Using appropriate graphs represent the ‘% of Total’ and ‘%of total profits’. What does this information tell you and what advice should be passed on to Tribute Ltd with regards to their database and profits being made by the sales of Jonnie Jones CDs. (10 marks)
(Task 2 total: 15 marks) Task 3
You now believe that you need to get a better understanding of Jonnie and his marketplace and have decided to collect some primary data. After speaking to Jonnie you are going to do some field observation at two different locations at which he performs. The first location is the Theatre in Uxbridge and the other is a shopping mall in Brighton where he is doing a brief appearance followed by some album signings. Both observations were done over the Christmas period.
In the Mall Jonnie set up his equipment and had next to him a sign reading “Jonnie Jones, Tribute Artist of music legend Jimi Hendrix”. He plays for about three hours and the music could be heard throughout the mall.
You sit on a bench about 20 feet away from Jonnie and keep record of how long consumers seemed to express interest in Jones, an estimate of their age, gender and race. You observe over a period of two hours and during this time approximately 104 customers showed direct interest in Jonnie by approaching his table, picking up his CDs from the table, or speaking to him while he played.
Three days later you use the same observation format only this time you are at the Theatre in Uxbridge. The results of your studies are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Field observation Results

a) By combining the two sets of data what does this tell you about the nature of the consumers who showed interest in Jonnie’s music. (5 marks)
b) There appears to be some bias in the way you collected the data. Explain what is meant by bias and how do you think your data collection is biased or inappropriate? (5 marks)
c) How could you have improved the data collection? (5 marks)
(Task 3 total: 15 marks)

Task 4
Having discussed the observation study with Jonnie you explain that you need to get further data from older adults using a more detailed survey. Jonnie informs you that Tribute Ltd had employed a student intern over the summer vacation to do just that and he still had the data including the original questionnaire. The intern had been given few resources and the questionnaire consisted of only four questions:
1. Rank your preference for purchasing Jonnie Jones music (1 being most preferred and 5 least).
2. Rank your music listening preference (1-5) from a list of cassette tape; compact disc (CD); live/at a concert; digital/iPod/MP3 player; radio.
3. Which age category do you fit into? Under 44; 45-54; 55-64; 65-74; 75-84; 85+?
4. What is your gender? Male or female?
The intern had distributed the questionnaires at pubs in Brighton in which Jonnie had played during August. 92 completed surveys were collected. The age distribution was as follows:
Age Range Number of respondents
Under 44 14
45-54 18
55-64 20
65-74 15
75-84 17
85+ 8

49 of the respondents were female.
For question 1, respondents were asked to rank their preferences for venues for purchasing music by indicating which of the five response choices was their first choice, their second choice and so on. The range for each of the response options was 4. Overall, the lowest median (indicating the highest preference) fell into the retail category at 1.5. See Table 3.

Table 3: Frequency distribution of survey results for purchasing preferences. (* the first numbers in each box denotes the actual number of responses. Where % does not add up to 100% this is due to rounding).
Question 2 asked respondents to once again rank their preferences from one to five for the five options where 1 indicates the highest preference. Table 4 shows the results:

Table 4: Frequency distribution of survey results for listening preferences. (* the first numbers in each box denotes the actual number of responses. Where % does not add up to 100% this is due to rounding).

a) You are struggling to make meaningful sense of this data and decide to record the data from Tables 3 and 4 in a different way. You take the responses from the first three age categories ( under 44, 45-54, and 55-64) and collapse them into one new group that you call ‘ young at heart’ and all of the responses from the last three age categories (65-74, 75-84 and 85+) into a second new group that you call ‘seniors’. In EXCEL construct a table which shows the median ranking for purchasing and listening preferences by these new age groups.

Young at heart Seniors Total
Purchasing preferences
Retail 1 2 1.5
Concert 3 2 3
Online 2 4 3
Mail 4 3 3
Phone 4 3.5 4
Listening preferences
Cassette 5 3 4
CD 2 3 2
Live 4 3 3
Digital 3 5 4
Radio 2 2 2

Table 5: Median Ranking for purchasing and listening preferences by age group
Provide the new table as an import into your report. Comment on this table. (5 marks)

b) Based on the table created in (a) above carry out cross tabulations between the two age groups, ‘young at heart’ and ‘seniors’ to determine if preferences differ significantly for either preferences of where to buy music or preferred music format by age group. Show how you worked this out and indicate where the significant differences are. (15 marks)
c) Evaluate the intern’s survey research in terms of its appropriateness and what it revealed. (5 marks)
d) If you had been designing the survey what might you have done and what tests could you have performed on the data to provide meaningful information? (10 marks).

(Task 4 total: 35 marks)

Task 5
Based on all the data you have considered in Tasks 1-4 how should Tribute Ltd market Jonnie Jones’ music? Provide as much detail as possible in your response and state any assumptions you are making. (10 marks)