A Psychographical Clustering of Consumers by the Food Attitude: Influence on their Pork Buying Intention

Abstract

The domestic food market has grown up to enter maturation stage with extensively diverse segments. In order for a product to survive in this "red-ocean" market, it should have a specific appeal to consumers with various psychological-attitudes. Thus, the current study aimed to segment the Japanese consumers according to their psychographical-characteristics toward foods, and evaluate their effects on the consumption motives of each segmented consumer groups. An on-line questionnaire-based survey targeting on married females revealed four distinct clusters with different food attitudes: 1) spending a lot of money on food 2) saving money and taking simple-food, 3) saving money but enjoying food life, and 4) treasuring time with their family but having simple-food. Further the four consumer groups exhibited different consumption motives on pork employing MANOVA. Based on these results, we suggest that consumer segmentation based on psychographical-characteristics would be valuable approach to produce food marketing strategies.