Conducting Research for Barclays Brief 1 and Brief 2

My research helped a great deal as it helped us to create a well rounded insight for our proposed ideas. Neither of the three of us truly understood the ‘Student Struggle’ as we all lived at home with our parents, our main bills were minute in comparison to the average student who moves away from home, and pays rent etc.

By finding out from our peers asking them on average how they budgeted and make ends meet, majority said they have to write it out to see where their money goes. They also said they use coupons and discount cards. But majority of their money went on:

• Rent

• Food

• Gas & Electric

• Travel

Research for Brief 1: Financial Wellness

Research for Brief 2: T & C's

From my findings I found that students spend more money on three particular areas;

• Food

• Cloths

• Groceries & Rent

This theory was reinforced by my own questionnaire that I created for my dissertation researching on consumerism and the role advertising has in predicting the next 10 years. Our idea would focus on this spending habit to try and bring structure to student spending and to provide advice on savings.

We also found from our focus groups with fellow students from product design that they really liked the student debit card concept as they said they would use it. We discussed the photograph on the front of the card; some said they liked this idea because if you loose your card in a club people cannot use your card because your face would be on the front. However, others said that they didn’t like the idea of having their face on the card even though they use Unidays and have NUS cards. However, the majority liked the idea. But we thought it could be a personalised element of the card that students could choose to have or not.