Student Buying Behaviour Essay

Dissertation

Introduction and Rationale for Research

The main question that this dissertation will be based upon and will attempt to answer is:

To what extent does the price per unit of alcohol in an alcoholic beverage influence student purchasing behaviour in the United Kingdom?

Further research questions will also be addressed in order to draw meaningful conclusions. These questions are:

• How influential is income and employment status on student alcohol purchasing behaviour?

• How influential is the price per unit of alcohol in an alcoholic beverage on its perceived quality?

• How influential is the perceived or known quality of an alcoholic beverage on student purchasing behaviour?

• Do students measure the value for money of an alcoholic

For numerous years concerns have been raised about the UK’s excessive drinking culture and with this a lot of concern has been focussed on the level of alcohol consumption within the UK’s student population. A recent report into alcohol consumption conducted by the World Health Organisation placed the United Kingdom’s overall consumption as the 25th highest in the world out of the 196 countries that were examined. The report also identified that the UK has a significant binge drinking culture as it placed the UK 13th in the world for heavy episodic drinking, with heavy episodic drinking being defined as drinking more than six units on one occasion for women and eight units for men. Further to this, according to the report the average amount of alcohol consumed by people over the age of 15 in the UK in 2014 was 11.6 litres, almost twice the global average of 6.2 litres. (WHO,

Customer satisfaction is defined by Tse and Wilton (1988, p.204) as “the consumer’s response to the evaluation of the perceived discrepancy between prior expectation (or some norm of performance) and the actual performance of the product as perceived after its consumption.” If the performance meets the consumer’s expectation, they will be satisfied, if the performance is lower than their expectations they will be dissatisfied and if the performance surpasses expectation they will be delighted. The greater the difference between expected performance and the performance received, the greater the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. (Anderson, 1998). The level of satisfaction that a consumer has received from their purchase is likely to heavily influence their post-purchase actions. One of the most important post purchase actions is whether or not the consumer will purchase the product again in the future. If the product or service has satisfied the consumer’s needs it is likely that they will purchase the product again if they are required to, with the greater the level of satisfaction the increased likelihood of a repeat purchase. Further to this, a high level of customer satisfaction increases the likelihood that the consumer will purchase different items or services