Exploration of gender differences in bottled mineral water consumption: A projective study of consumer's perception in Brazil

Abstract

The bottled mineral water sector is strategic to countries like Brazil and understanding the factors that guides the purchase and consumption by men and women becomes vital to the product's commercial success. In this context, projective techniques are important tools to comprehend the consumers' perception and to the development of target strategies of marketing. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the gender differences about the bottled mineral water's perception through using Word Association (WA) alongside with the Partial Least Squares—Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA). The results demonstrated that from the 12 listed categories for the product, the most common were: “necessity,” “well-being,” “quality,” and “appearance,” and it was possible to identify through PLS-DA the main differences (p