Tanja Sauter

Tanja Sauter is a master student in Business Administration at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. She is especially interested in in the fields of online marketing and e-commerce. She finished her bachelor thesis “Moderators of the effect of media multitasking on advertising effectiveness” and received her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in 2019. Alongside her studies, she is currently working for C.H.Beck, one of the major German publishing houses. Her main responsibilities include digital marketing in general, blogger relations and the marketing of e-books.

For her practice-oriented masters' seminar she used a Choice Based Conjoint Analysis to examine the market for Smart Home Gardens. She chose this product as it is not only a lifestyle object, but also addresses current issues such as the trend towards urbanization and the growing interest in sustainable food.

The aim of her research was to identify the most important product features that might lead to a purchase decision. She then used a Latent Class Analysis to divide the respondents into different segments. She decomposed the Smart Home Garden into four relevant attribute groups, each with four levels. The analyzed attributes included different pricing options as well as the design and the size of the Smart Garden.

One of her discoveries is that the initial purchase price is much more important than the price for the recurring purchases of seeding pods. The additional survey revealed that a Smart Garden is particularly interesting for people who live in apartments without access to a garden, as well as for people who have little time to look after plants.