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Keywords- Brand choice, Youngsters
Introduction
Teenagers and young adults are now a days one of the most attractive and appealing market segments for the companies. It is one of the growing markets of today’s world as teens and young adults are now indulging themselves more into the consumption activities. This kind of youth market come across many brands while buying the products from which they have to make their choice .As we know that youngsters are frequently motivated by the various factors and due to emergence of youth market, the research on affecting factors have become important as these factors influence their consumption patterns. This study is therefore designed to examine the different factors that affect the brand choice of teenagers and young adults while buying a mobile phone and examining whether there is a significant difference in influence of at least one factor on brand choice among the two age groups.
Rationale
Many research works have been previously done regarding the brand choice of youngsters by taking into consideration the products attributes. But the focus has now been broadened by in international research by taking into the affect of factors other than just properties of the products while choosing a brand. For instance the factors like family and friends can play a vital role during the brand choice. Therefore this study would be contributing to the knowledge regarding these kinds of factors in brand choice of youth market by considering an active industry of mobile phones.
Objectives
This study is designed to examine the different factors that affect the brand choice of teenagers and young adults while buying a mobile phone and examining whether there is a significant difference in influence of at least one factor on brand choice among the two age groups of youngsters.
Literature Review
Teenagers and youngsters are considered important market as in future they will become in future the worth customers for the company [1].The factors affecting the brand choice therefore are important to be studied because the consumption behaviours in young age affect the behavior at later stage [2].There are a lot of factors that affect the brand choice of teenagers and young adults. These influencing factors can be social factors like culture, social class, reference groups and besides these there might be some personal factors such as motivation, personality, self image, beliefs and attitude [3].The factors like family, friends, advertisements, attitude, brand price, sales point and sales people and brand quality and image were considered by Ali Akdemir and Selin Temil [4] during their research on youngsters brand choice while they buy a mobile phone.
Youngsters and Mobile phones
Mobile phones have become mobile phones have become an elementary part of communication. Few years back mobile phones were only a communication tool for elder people but now a days young people are more involved in mobile phone purchases. They not only consider mobile phones as only a tool of communication but also a source of entertainment. This attitude towards the mobile phone influences the brand choice of these young people. The most common factor studied for the brand choice of mobile phone is the properties and features of mobile phones, however the youngsters get influenced by many other underlying factors that affect their brand choice regarding the mobile phones which will be focused in our study.
Factors Affecting Brand Choice of youngsters
We know that teenagers and young people can be targeted through their emotions and advertisements are the source that can not only affect the emotions but also convey the concealed messages [5].Therefore advertisements can be termed as major medium of influencing the brand choice of teenagers as they are present everywhere affecting the daily lives of people placing themselves as one of the most noticeable mean of companies’ marketing strategy. Youngsters nowadays are grave users of media; they get influence by different means of advertising however they choose these media according to their personalities and communal needs thus the advertising mediums to target these young people are selected on the basis of each medium’s benefits and limitations [6].For instance television advertisements increase youngsters interaction regarding their consumption with their parents as they can discuss it more with them and decrease the peer effect [7] as they get more interacted with the parents while watching television at home.
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Person get affected by advertisement during every phase of life but advertising is very important during the adolescent periods of consumer because the consumer advertising attitude and credibility are formed during this time period Advertisements can play a very vital role in brand choice of youngsters especially females as they fancy themselves at place of different models in the advertisements and shape their buying behaviours accordingly [8]
Though the conscious aspects of choice making are studied a lot but the non conscious factors have been ignored. Attitude is one of the non-conscious influencer on consumer brand choice [9].For instance male adolescents are more concerned about their brand choice this might be because they have more materialistic attitude and social motivations in order to build status among his peers. Therefore the researchers are nowadays be focusing on the extent of attitude effects on the choice of consumer [10].
These attitudes although greatly affect the brand choice of the consumer however can themselves be affected due to the misinformation
regarding the product in the advertisements and real product experience
[11].
These attitudes may also get be affected by certain factors that might be the external or internal, for instance the community in which the person lives influences the attitude of the individuals [12]
Brand image to a much extent is involved in brand choice making of youngsters. It is the defining term for brand as perceive by the consumers same as the persons are perceived in terms of their personalities in mind of others’ [13].If the companies are successful in creating a positive brand image in minds of consumers, brand loyalty of the consumer would be increased [14] and thus their brand choice would be affected.
In the same way brand quality is perceived by the youngsters while buying the product but it might be affected by various factors for instance it can be influenced by the place from where it is bought [15] that means that point of sales does affect the brand quality perception and ultimately the brand choice.
Consumers learn about the brand and products through socialization known as consumer socialization and family is one of the significant influencer in this socialization process. Family influences adolescents’ consumption and brand choice as it is the major source of information and attitude development for these youngsters. And with the passage of time this influence might get reduced due to alteration in relationships with the parents [16]. Family members buying behavior can be imitated by the younger ones in the family [17] where it is not usually necessary that the influencer is the expert of the product to be bought by the consumer [18]. As in most of cases the young adults and the teenagers depend financially on their parents, the younger people usually consider the role of their family members if the products are high price and if any social risk is involved.However the extent to which a family can exert pressure regarding the youngsters purchase decision depends on how concerned is the person in the product or brand to be bought [19]
It was found that friends become the significant source of information regarding brand when children reach their adolescence [17].Friends can therefore influence the brand choice of the teenagers and youngsters. They might want to go for the brands that are suggested by the friends or they might go for different brands in order to differentiate themselves from others [20] so that they can indicate their social identity [21].Thus these kind of reference and peer groups are used by the advertisers in order to motivate the consumers to go for the particular brand and products [22].
Besides all of the above discussed factors, role of brand price always plays an important role in youngsters buying behavior as they get influence by other factors like amount of money available [23] that will make it feasible for them to go for a particular brand.
In light of the above evidences of factors effecting consumer purchases we conclude that these factors have a role in youth market’s buying behaviour and brand choice therefore we would be determining the role of above discussed factors in brand choice of teenagers and young adults of Pakistan’s youth market while purchasing mobile phones. Thus our hypothesis would be:
H1: All the factors have different influence on the brand choice of youth market while buying a mobile phone
H2: There is a significant difference between in the influence of at least factor on brand choice among the two age groups while buying a mobile phone
Methodology
Study Design
The study is a questionnaire based survey in order to know the respondents’ view regarding the affect of seven factors on their brand choice. This questionnaire based survey for the research has been extensively used in various brand choice studies and is regarded as a helpful instrument for the research purpose.
Questionnaire
The respondents were to fill a self administered questionnaire regarding the role of the seven selected factors during their brand choice of mobile phone. The questionnaire was devised by adapting the scales from previous research studies including the study of Ali Akdemir and Selin Temil (2010) and a study of Martin and Bush (2000) on youngsters’ brand choice while they buy a mobile phone .The questionnaire consisted of few queries about demographics of the respondents and likert sentences regarding the factors influence. The questions were regarding respondents’ trait including their age, gender, educational qualification, monthly expenditure, current mobile phone brand, time period of changing their mobile phone, sales point preference, price range of current mobile phone, ideal mobile phone and whether they have ever purchased it or not, best mobile phone company for its advertisement, respondents’ opinion regarding the best mobile. The rest of the questions were concerned of the respondents’ agreeability regarding the influence of these factors on their brand choice of mobile phone ranging from 5 to 1 for strongly agree to strongly disagree respectively.
Pilot Testing
Pretesting was done by taking the sample of 15 youngsters, including 7 males and 8 females and the feedback was collected regarding the questionnaire. The questionnaire had no ambiguities in its understanding besides the suggestion to increase the price ranges of the respondents’ current mobile phone in order to cater the mobile phone sets which are of above 30,000 PKR.
Respondents
The survey was conducted among 600 students based on the convenience sampling, from the 20 universities of twin cities; Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Out of these 600 respondents, seven respondents were beyond our considered age group of youngsters.
Data Evaluation
The survey data was evaluated with the help of SPSS. The influencing factor were first examined with the help of their means while for the difference in factors’ influence, the respondents were divided into two groups; 17-19 and from 20-25 and later judged with the help of independent sample t-test.
Results
In order to test our first hypothesis we took the means of the likert results for each factor so that we could rank the factors’ on basis of their influence on brand choice of youth market during mobile phone purchase. All of the factors had different level of respondents’ views regarding their influence on brand choice Therefore we accepted the hypothesis that each factor has a different influence on brand choice of youth market while purchasing a mobile phone. Taking the means for each factor we can figured out that the mean for the agreeability regarding friends’ influence is highest. Brand price is having the mean of 3.40 while advertisement has a mean of 3.38.Attitude has a mean of 3.32 where as family has a mean of 3.29.In the same way sales people and point has a mean of 2.99 and brand quality and image has only a mean of 2.88 .
Factors
To test that whether there is a difference in factors’ affect on the two age groups i.e between group of age 17-19 and 19-20 we used an independent sample t test and found that there is a significant difference in affect of brand price, friends and advertisement between two age groups making our second hypothesis true. According to the data, the age group of 17-19 has greater influence of these factors on their brand choice while purchasing a mobile phone.
Discussion
The results of our study reveal that all the factors have different influence on the brand choice of youth market while buying a mobile phone. According the main results, friends are the most influencing factor during the mobile phone purchase. While the family lies at fourth place although it was expected that this factor would have a large influence on the brand choice. The previous study done by Martin and Bush (2000) also reveals that although the youngsters get influenced by various factors for their brand choice but the family members like parents remain the critical influencer during this brand choice decision. This shows in our case that friends’ opinion and suggestions are the important while buying a mobile phone. Brand price stands second when respondents were ask that whether their brand choice of mobile phone gets affected by the brand price because mostly youngsters buy the brand on the basis of the money available with them (Hyat & Dotson, 2005).The third most influencing factor is the advertisements which is considered as influencing and shaping the self views and purchase decisions of the youngsters. There was no large influence of sales point and sales people was observed on the brand choice of these young consumers. There was almost a balance in choosing the point of sales between the authorized dealers and random shops, while the trend of online mobile phone purchase was the lowest depicting that respondents were not very much into the online purchase as compared to the teenagers online purchase in other countries. While dividing the sample into two groups ranging from17-19 and 20-25, the difference of factors’ affect was observed in brand price, advertisement and friends’ affect. The respondents from age 17-19 were observed more affected with these three factors. The demographics show that the monthly expenditures of the age group from 20-25 were higher than the expenditures of age group17-19, the might be that the smaller age group consumers depend more on their families for their finances as compared to the adult age groups which makes them more influenced by the brand price while choosing their mobile phones. Similarly smaller age group was more influenced by advertising because they are in emotions building phase of their lives including their emotions towards the purchase which are targeted by the advertisement (Devi & Kotwal, 2008).While being the most influencing factor, friends also differed in its influence on the two age groups. In this case also, the 17-19 age group was more influenced by the friends. However the difference in family’s influence is most observed in previous researches (Akdemir & Temil, 2010) which was, as in our research, detected as of no difference in its influence.
Acknowledgment
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