Problem Definition
Background
India, the world’s largest malt-based drinks market, accounts for 22% of the world’s retail volume sales. These drinks are traditionally consumed as milk substitutes and marketed as a nutritious drink, mainly consumed by the old, the young, and the sick.
The Health food drinks category consists of white drinks and brown drinks. South and East India are large markets for these drinks, accounting for the largest proportion of all India sales. The total market is placed at about 90,000 tons and is estimated to be growing at about 4%. These Malt beverages, though, are still an urban phenomenon. White drinks account for almost two-thirds of the market. GSK Consumer Healthcare is the market leader in the white malt beverages category with a 60. 7% overall market share.
Heinz’s Complan comes in second (in this segment, third overall) with a market share of 12-13%. Market leader GSK also owns other brands such as Boost, Maltova and Viva. Currently, brown drinks (which are cocoa-based) continue to grow at the expense of white drinks like Horlicks and Complan. The share of brown drinks has increased from about 32% to 35% over the last five years. Cadbury’s Bournvita is the leader in the brown drink segment with a market share of around 15%. Other significant players are Nestle’s Milo and GCMMF’s Nutramul.
Problem Statement
The project had been undertaken with an objective to understand customer behavior in the “Health Food Drink (HFD)” product category. The objective of the study also included identifying the determinant purchase factors, the customer segments, and the sources of information they rely on. The existing positioning of prominent brands and the perceptions among different segments were also covered under the study. Brand loyalty and switching were also studied. The brand personality was also studied as a part of the project.
Literature Review
Nutrition in India
After 4 years of age, a child’s energy needs per kilogram of bodyweight are decreasing but the actual amount of energy (calories) required increases, as the child gets older. From 5 years to adolescence, there is a period of slow but steady growth. Dietary intakes of some children may be less than recommended for iron, calcium, vitamins A and D, and vitamin C, although in most cases -as long as the energy and protein intakes are adequate and a variety of foods, including fruit and vegetables, are eaten- deficiencies are unlikely.
Regular meals and healthy snacks that include carbohydrate-rich foods, fruits, and vegetables, dairy products, lean meats, fish, poultry, eggs, legumes, and nuts should contribute to proper growth and development without supplying excessive energy to the diet. Children need to drink plenty of fluids, especially if it is hot or they are physically active. Water is obviously a good source of liquid and supplies fluid without calories. Variety is important in children’s diets and other sources of fluid such as milk and milk drinks, fruit juices can also be chosen to provide needed fluids.
In India, each State is practically equivalent to a country with its specific socio-economic level, different ethnic groups, food habits, health infrastructures, and communication facilities. Thus, the nutritional status of the population shows significant variation between states since it results from a varying combination of factors. In the last 20 years, there has been an improvement in the nutritional status of the Indian population. This improvement results from not only changes in food intake but also socio-economic factors, increased availability of potable water, lower morbidity, and improvement of health facilities.
In children under five years of age, the marked improvement in nutritional status is shown by the reduction of the prevalence of underweight from 63%, in the 1975-79 period to 53% in the 1988-90 period. The under-five mortality rate (U5MR), an important indicator of the socio-economic development, and the health and nutritional status of society declined from 282% in 1962 to 115‰ in 1994. However, a multitude of infectious diseases such as respiratory and intestinal infections as well as malaria remains the main cause of death in children under five, with malnutrition being an aggravating factor.
Measles, tetanus, typhoid, and hepatitis are also frequent causes of death during infancy and childhood. In the last 20 years, there have been no significant changes in patterns of dietary intake. Cereals remain the staple food in India providing most of the energy intake. Since the seventies, the consumption of foods like pulses, roots, and tubers have fallen, while those of other foods like sugar, “jaggery” (unrefined brown sugar), fats and oils, and green leafy vegetables have slightly increased. The average Indian diet remains largely deficient in green leafy vegetables, meat, and fish, milk, and milk products.
Moreover, it also remains deficient in some micronutrients such as vitamin A, iodine, and iron. Adolescents who are undergoing rapid growth and development are one of the nutritionally vulnerable groups who have not received the attention they deserve. In under-nourished children, rapid growth during adolescence may increase the severity of under-nutrition. Early marriage and pregnancy will perpetuate both maternal and child under-nutrition. At the other end of the spectrum among the affluent segment of the population, adolescent obesity is increasingly becoming a problem.
Pre-school children constitute the most nutritionally vulnerable segment of the population and their nutritional status is considered to be a sensitive indicator of community health and nutrition. Over the last two decades, there has been some improvement in energy intake and substantial reduction in moderate and severe undernutrition in preschool children India has enormous under-nutrition and over-nutrition problems Asia has the largest number of malnourished children in the world. The Double Burden of Malnutrition in Asia was inspired by the massive challenge that this situation currently poses for Asia.
It describes the main driving forces behind the groundswell of under-nutrition while shedding light on the emerging double burden of co-existing underweight and overweight, and the linkages between these two different forms of malnutrition. There are two types of nutritional problems – one is under-nutrition and another is over-nutrition. Emphasis should be given not only to food but also to care and health, the reason being that even if children in the age group of 0-2 years are able to get food, they may have mothers who do not have enough time to pay attention to their children.
Similarly, if there is no health-guaranteeing environment, and children suffer from diarrhoeal diseases, no amount of food will help prevent malnutrition. Over-nutrition, on the other hand, means either too many calories or the wrong types of calories such as saturated fats or highly processed sugar that lead to obesity, vascular diseases, etc. Many developing countries have under-nutrition and those in Europe and North America have over-nutrition problems. There is this in-between category with countries like India that still have an enormous amount of under-nutrition and significant over-nutrition problems.
In India, for instance, around 50 percent of its children under the age of five are undernourished or malnourished. But in urban areas, the over-nutrition problem is shooting up, thanks to the change in lifestyle and food habits. As a result, health systems are under huge stress. When there is malnutrition, there is a higher level of lower birth rate. One in three babies born in India weighs significantly low because their mothers are undernourished. Some low-weight babies die and some survive and those who survive to adapt to malnutrition and scarcity.
That is, the biological adaptation is programmed to maximize every calorie the body gets. This adaptation that helped a malnourished baby survive suddenly turns out to be a mal-adaptation when the baby becomes an adult. The adult, who was malnourished in the past, gains extra weight even when he takes only a normal amount of food because of the biological adaptation. Brand Loyalty Selling to brand loyal customers is far less costly than converting new customers (Reichheld 1996, Rosenberg and Czepiel 1983). In addition, brand loyalty provides firms with tremendous competitive weapons.
Brand loyal consumers are less price-sensitive (Krishnamurthi and Raj 1991). A strong consumer franchise gives manufacturers leverage with retailers (Aaker 1991). And, loyalty reduces the sensitivity of consumers to marketplace offerings, which gives the firm time to respond to competitive moves (Aaker 1991). In general, brand loyalty is a reflection of brand equity, which for many businesses is the largest single asset. Perhaps the most cited conceptual definition of the brand loyalty comes from Jacoby and Chestnut (1978, p. 0): “The biased, behavioral response, expressed over time, by some decision-making unit, with respect to one or more alternative brands out of a set of such brands, and is a function of psychological (decision-making, evaluative) processes. ” Consistent with this definition are two broad categories of operational definitions. The first stresses the “behavioral response, expressed over time”—typically a series of purchases. As Day (1979) observed, however, the major limitation of behavioral measures is the failure to identify the motive and the resulting confusion between brand loyalty and other forms of repeat buying.
The major alternative operational definition is based on consumer attitudes, preferences, and purchase intentions. These measures stress the cognitive “bias,” and the “psychological (decision-making evaluative) processes” underlying loyalty.
Health-Related Expenses
KSA TECHNOPARK has conceived an innovative product called Health Outlook 2003, which provides strategic insights to consumer shopping and buying behavior. Apart from consumer insights, complete health profiling is also done for providing derived disease incidence and prevalence in the country.
This Pan Indian research model provides large research depths by covering about 10,000 households across cities like Chandigarh, Delhi, Jaipur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Calcutta, Patna, Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin, Hyderabad, Madurai, Ahmedabad, Indore, Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, and Surat. The rich respondent profile includes SEC A, B, and C giving good coverage for demographic types. Health Outlook shows that health enjoys about 9.4 percent share of the wallet of the Indian consumers and is on the rise for the last three years.
This spend includes health supplements, health drinks, doctors and consultants fees, medicines, medical insurance, regular check-ups, etc. About 91 percent of this was the out-of-pocket expense and only 9 percent came from employers and insurance. Analysis of the consumer’s drug purchase behavior shows that 59 percent use old prescriptions and 29 percent used over-the-counter drugs, meaning 88 cents of the consumers indulged in self-medication. Consumer attitudes to health drinks are mainly influenced by quality attributes.
Ethical factors are important in some cases, but they may be overstated. The relationships between consumers’ awareness of health drink, price, and perceived quality of food were investigated by tests involving a series of consumer panels and sensory evaluation. Sensory responses were also matched to instrumental analysis data. Results indicated that overall there was no relation between panelists’ views about health drinks and their sensory perceptions. Eighty percent of the panelists felt that organic products were too expensive, but would buy them if they were cheaper.
However, the study showed that most of the people would not be likely to change their preference once they had made a product choice based upon sensory attributes. This has important implications, indicating that not only price but also the sensory quality of health drink must be considered in order to maintain repeated purchases by most consumers. It is widely accepted that consumer acceptance of drinks is mainly determined by their sensory perception, while choice is strongly influenced by the perceived value for money.
Ethical factors are important in some cases, but they may be overstated. Although comparisons between organic and conventional drinks have been reported for a range of attributes, measures of the quality of health drinks as perceived by consumers using objective sensory evaluation methods, or the relevance of any preconceptions in perception have not been studied. This study aimed to investigate the relationship of objective quality measurements including sensory attributes and consumer perception of organically and conventionally produced health drink products.
About two-thirds of the consumers that participated in the survey believed that health drink is good for the environment, and 55% thought that it is healthier. However, there was some confusion relating to the use of pesticides and chemicals in that. Few consumers distinguished health drinks by appearance or taste. Buyers of health drinks were more likely to indicate that appearance and taste are better, but environmental protection was still the dominant perceived benefit. Buyers who believe that health drink is better also think that it is expensive.
References
- Reichheld, Frederick (1966). The Loyalty Effect”: Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
- Kotler, Philip (2005) “Marketing Management”, Pearson Education (Eleventh Edition).
- Malhotra, N. K. (2005). ” Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation”, Pearson Education(Fourth Edition)
- Day, G. S. (1969). “A Two-Dimensional Concept of Brand Loyalty,” Journal of Consumer Research 2, 4, 241-258.
- Richard I. Levin, David S Rubin(1997). “Statistics for Management”, Prentice Hall of India(seventh edition)
- www.expresshealthcaremgmt.com/20030815/events6.html
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- www.organic.aber.ac.uk/library/Consumer%20perception%20of%20organic%20food.pdf
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- www.nestle.com.au/milo
- www.superbrandsindia.com/superbrands2003/bournvita
- superbrandsindia.com/superbrands2003/boost/index.htm
