Factors affecting Consumer Buying Behavior, Consumer Satisfaction and Consumer Loyalty in the Ghee Industry. “A Perspective of Bangalore Ghee Market”

The Impetus behind this research paper was to get an insight into Ghee Industry and consumer behavior towards consumption of a low involvement product such as Ghee, as surprisingly, even though India currently stands as the world's largest producer as well as consumer of Ghee, not many studies have been conducted and any available data is limited to annual reports of Dairy farms. This study was conducted during the time period of April 2016 to August, 2016. The study had revealed that for a product like ghee which belongs to a highly-fragmented market and is somewhat undifferentiated across brands both organized and unorganized markets, producing it, product attributes such as product freshness and smell as well as pricing turned out to be key variables in the purchasing process. Gender also had an impact on the buying decision. The study was intended to understand as to how the aforementioned factors could affect the customer's satisfaction of purchase and whether this in turn could affect the customer's resolve to remain loyal to a particular brand of ghee. This study would be useful for organizations who would look forward to venture into a highly competitive market space such as the Ghee market by enabling strategies for product launches to be aligned to the customer perspectives.

The Sample Unit for this study were 200 consumers derived using probabilistic multi stage sample design, from the overall population of consumers visiting urban retailers’ outlets (both organized and unorganized) to make their purchase and the primary data for study was collected through one-to-one structured interview through questionnaire and observation schedules. Frequency analysis, Cross Tabulation, correlation was used for analysis and Linear Regression was used as inferential model.