Survey on Grocery Consumption

This survey was used to define the target audience for recipe books. The preferred portion size, cooking style and ingredients were important elements to be established by the survey, as well as consumption habits. A little less than thirty (in fact, 28) people answered this survey. The average respondent is part of a household of 2 or 3 members and spends $100 to $120 weekly on groceries. The average grocery purchased is composed of 20% to 40% vegetables, 20% to 40% meat and substitutes and less than 20% each of flour products, prepared foods and desserts. The choice of a recipe is based mostly on whether it tastes better or whether it is better for health. Our respondents have mixed feelings about organic food: 44% believe in buying it while 48% don’t. Desserts are usually eaten after dinner. Preparation for breakfast must take less than 15 minutes, preparation for lunch between 15 and 30 minutes and preparation for dinner between 30 minutes and an hour. A majority of respondents prefer stovetop cooking, followed by oven-baked meals. Recipes are mostly gathered from recipe books and friends and family. In general, people are not influenced by food advertising. Overall, the survey met our goals. It gave a precise portrait of the target audience for a recipe book and the criteria used to select recipes. Questions #5 and #10 are not specific enough, question #3 would benefit from a 10% incremental scale starting at 0% and question #2 needs ''per person'' added at the end of the question. It is difficult to prepare a survey that can reach each person’s possible answer. In a future survey, we would ask clearer and more precise questions.

William and Ghislain


Our analysis of the survey reveals that most people spend around 60 dollars per person per week on groceries. Most people spend a relatively small percentage of money on frozen foods; less than 20%. This is rather surprising because the frozen/prepared foods section has grown a lot in the past decade. We believe that people may not have answered entirely honestly to this question because the purchase of frozen foods is badly seen in today's society. We can back this up because the majority answered ''NO'' to wheather or not they believed in buying organic foods. The survey also revealed that people spend more time cooking dinner than they do lunch, and they spend yet again more time on lunch than they do on breakfast. Although we cannot see a commun theme to the questions of the survey, it does provide interesting results for analysis.


Pawel & Vincent

Survey on the Environment

The purpose of our survey was to find out how people are concerned about the environment. We wanted to learn on people's everyday life habits and their impact on the nature. The results of our survey were sometimes surprising; we didn't expect people to be as much environmentally friendly. For example, people dispose in a responsible way of their harmful wastes: 45% of them said that they dispose correctly of their old batteries. Also, 75% of the respondents are aware that paper billing is a big waste of paper and trees. Therefore, they use electronic billing services. Energy-efficient products were bought by 84% of the respondents in the past year. And a majority of 79.2% use electricity to heat their homes over natural gas and oil. But, we found that still a lot of people use their personnal car for daily use. On one hand, the survey met our goal because we could rapidly evaluate people’s habits and their effect on the environment. On the other hand, there was only 25 respondents to our survey, it might no be as accurate as a large scale survey.

Pierre-Luc and Ian

Twenty five people responded to the survey about what individuals do to care for the environment. The questions explore diverse aspects of caring for the environment starting with the use of a motor vehicle and the frequency to recycling habits and habits concerning dangerous waste disposal such as batteries. While analyzing the results of the survey we notice that the car remains the most common method of transportation even though most of the clientele surveyed are students. None of the people surveyed own a Hybrid vehicle which was not very surprising considering the high price tag on those vehicles. We noticed in the survey results that most respondants have the good habit of recycling most of the materials that we come across in our daily lives such as paper, plastic & cardboard. We also noticed that most of the dangerous waste is disposed of in a proper manner by our surveyed students.
Creating a survey is a challenging experience where questions must be worded in a way that leaves no room for various interpretation. If this experience was to be repeated I believe that the surveyed people should come from different backgrounds as I believe that survey results can almost be predicted when the people surveyed all come from similar backgrounds i.e. ENA students. Survey's are amazing and allow the surveyors to obtain an overall picture on any given topic within a fairly small amount of time and minimal effort.

Pascal H

Survey on Ad Exposure

The purpose of our survey was to determine how much the people are exposed to advertisement and to which point they're aware of it. We had 24 respondents to our survey. 75% of respondents were male, which is obvious, because we're in ENA, but it also demonstrates that female were more interested in our survey, since the male/female ratio in the school is around 10/1. All students were aware of the existence of embedded ads. A vast majority of students use special software to block advertisements on their internet browser. Most of them, change channel or go away during commercial break and very few of them watch the commercials. Our goal was to know if the students are aware of embedded advertisements and its way of persuading people. In general, the students are aware of the true nature of this type of commercial and they usually protect themselves by avoinding these ads.

Discussion of various articles from MACLEAN'S magazine

My classmates and I have exchanged point of views and opinions on various articles published in the September 1st 2008 edition of MACLEAN'S magazine. We first discussed the article on page 13 "The West mad at China for being fake: that's rich", we all agreed that China had gone too far and used the olympics as a propaganda tool to improve their image amongst the international community but most importantly amongst their own people. We all agreed that even though China admitted trying to fool the spectators by using the voice of a different girl than the one who was actually signing during the opening ceremony they still managed to impress and maintain a positive image. 

Secondly, we discussed the article on page 29 entitled "What's a Mouseketeer with no gun". We were surprised to read that fatal shootings at work is the leading cause of occupational death in the U.S. We all agreed that having guns or any other weapons in your vehicle does not improve security but gives a false sense of security. We even believe that permitting to have weapons in vehicles could actually have an adverse effect as criminals would aim for cars in order to obtain weapons to commit criminal acts. 

Thirdly, we discussed the article of page 33 entitled "Looking for help in all the wrong places". the article speaks about the financial problem in the airline industry. Problems that are too often blamed on the increasing oil prices but we believe that the problems in the airline industry are caused by much more than de-regulation and increasing oil prices, throughout our group discussion we agreed that companies should look at their organizational structures to reduces their operating costs and improve their efficiency.

The other article that we discussed was "Groceries go under the shrink ray". The article speaks about companies shrinking packages while maintaining the price of the larger package. Surprisingly a few group members had never realized that this cost saving strategy was used by companies. We did not come to a consensus on this article, some group members preferred to pay higher prices for the usual container size and others preferred that the price be maintained low and the size diminished.  

Finally, the last article that we discussed was the page 34 article entitled "Evian for kids: it's all about image". We unanimously agreed that the company's intention is more than just providing healthy options for kids lunches. We believe they are simply trying to sell the same product as they usually sell but at a higher price with a more child attractive package. We believe they use the "Nag factor" to their advantage to try to have parents purchase their new environmentally   damaging package.

School debate

During the discussion many important points came up concerning the descision process of choosing a school. First, it was noted that field of interest was the number one priority in choosing a school (such as engineering, medicine, business, etc). However, if two equally renowned schools are available, the school closest to home should be chosen for simplicity of transportation. A second interesting point discussed by my classmates and I was that extra-curricular activities would likely help a student in his studies as long as it pertains to his field, and that a reasonable amount of time is spent on the activity. Finally, it was noted that if a student has no particular preference in choosing field of studies, that student should make a choice based on basic interests (computers, mechanics, etc) and employments statistics of past graduates. This is simply because if you aren't sure whether or not you will like the field, you might as well make sure that you will get a job uppon graduation, and that it will pay rather well.

Embedded advertising

My classmates and I had a discussion about embedded advertising. Together, we talked about the positive and negative aspects of this new form of publicity. We realized that we preferred embedded advertising to regular tv commercial breaks if it is done correctly. We pointed out how it could help the advertisers of today to get their product seen more easily. We also found out that executive producers also benefit from it by saving money on the sponsored products seen in their shows. Finally, we thought it could be, in a certain way, a trap for the audience because they are influenced in a more subtle way than with tv commercials.

Discussion about Canada's best professional schools

After discussing Canada’s best professional schools, everybody, in my group, agreed that lawyers are facing too much pressure, even for the salary they earn. After talking about the expectations for doctors, we all agreed that we would not work 90 hours a week, because it does not allow us enough time with our family. We thought that some engineering disciplines are less popular than others, because they are not known well enough. We also found that more female physicians entering the field would have one major benefit. In our opinion, patients will get better service because female physicians are recognized as taking more time with their patients.