The Impact of Packaging and Promotional Mix Elements on Customers’ Purchase Decision of Bottled Water Evidence from Higher Education Students in Addis Ababa
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Date
2016-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Packaging is a wrapping of product that holds the information regarding product and the manufacturer of a product. Moreover, Promotion is defined as the coordination of all the efforts of vendors to create channels of information and persuasion in selling their goods and services, or to promote the idea. Developing and properly managing these concepts has been emphasized as an important issue for most firms. Along with the Ethiopian beverage sector fast growth, the competition of the bottled water market is fierily and fragmented due to numerous brands vying for consumer attention. This study, therefore using bottled drinking water as example to investigate the impact of packaging and promotional mix elements on customers’ purchase decision of bottled water in higher education students in Addis Ababa. The specific objective of the study were to investigate the relationship between the physical appearance and the Integrated marketing Communication elements (Color, Size, Wrapper design, Advertising, Word of mouth and Celebrity endorsement) and customers’ purchase decision of bottled water in higher education students in Addis Ababa. The target population in this study was 5,640 registered undergraduate and postgraduate students in Addis Ababa University from college of Business & Economics and School of Commerce premises. Cluster sampling was adopted to select the University and 397 representatives from an ordered sample size from the different stratified departments were selected conveniently. Data were collected using structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the properties of the data and inferential statistics were derived using correlation and multiple regression analysis. This study was used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 17.0) as a tool to process and analyze data and results were presented in tables and percentage. The results shows that all the specific objectives of the study were significant at 95 % confidence level, there were a strongly significant impact of color of packaging, size of packaging, wrapper design of packaging, advertising, word of mouth and celebrity endorsement on customers’ purchase decision. The result suggest that management should adopt, develop and improve a combination of packaging and promotional mix elements that can bring distinct outcomes in terms of turnover, improved market share, customer retention and productivity among others
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elements of packaging, promotional mix, customer purchase decision