FACTORS THAT AFFECT BEER BRAND PREFERENCE OF ADDIS ABAB’S CITY CONSUMERS

Abstract

Beer consumers’ brand preference is influenced by a range of factors in the market. But factors affecting consumers’ decisions towards a specific beer brand is not well understood.The objective of this study was to assess the factors influencing consumer’s beer brand preference in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia. The variables included in this study are quality, price, emotion, family and friends, advertisement, Place of origin, Corporate Social Responsibility as independent variables and customer’s beer brand preference as dependent variable. Both primary and secondary data were used in this research. As methods of collecting primary data, a structured five point Likert scale questionnaire was employed and data was collected from 374 respondents in Addis Ababa City, Ethiopia. For secondary data, any authorized sources including company annual reports, books, articles, journals, magazines and others were used. The research has used both descriptive and inferential statistics. Frequency & percentage were used to describe demographic characteristics and Means, standard deviations to analyze factors influencing brand preference. Correlation and multiple linear regressions were also employed to analyze the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables. The model summary reveals that the proportion of the variation in consumers brand preference, explained by the factors jointly is 67.8 %. The remaining 32.8 % of the variance is explained by other variables not included in this study. Advertisement is the best predictor of consumers brand choices. This is followed by quality, emotional benefit, family and friends influence with respectively.Hence, it may be concluded that, the null hypothesis is rejected; so, the explanatory variables may significantly explain for consumers brand preference. The findings and recommendations of this study might assist marketers to look at the determinants of brand preference among their consumers which in turn would help them to evaluates and reshape their marketing strategies.