Customer Segmentation by Attributes Considered Important During the Buying Decision-Making Process for Cheese

Abstract

Two types of attributes characterize food products: intrinsic and extrinsic. The difference between them consists in the fact that the intrinsic ones disappear after consumption (taste, shape) while the second are persistent, often being marketing instruments (price, brand, package etc). In order to build adequate marketing strategies for their products, companies must perform researches among consumers and identify their preferences regarding product attributes important when deciding to purchase a food product. The present study has the main aim to identify how the customers adopt the buying decision for cheese and to build proper market segmentation into types of customers, which share the same preferences, so the cheese producers could build their strategies based on market reality. A survey has been conducted in January-February 2012 in Cluj-Napoca using a questionnaire. This was build also as an audit instrument for the agro-food companies when performing researches among their customers. The methods used to interpret data are: Keyser-Meyer-Olkin test, Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, Principal Component Analysis and K-means cluster analysis. The intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of cheese were grouped into seven factors. The customers were divided into two clusters or groups according to the seven factors identified. The first group is health-oriented, while the second cluster is hedonic-oriented. The research contributed to a very useful customer segmentation which identified two groups of people with different attributes of cheese considered important during the buying decision phase. The agro-food companies could build their strategies into an adequate way, using real information about their customers.