An analysis of consumer preferences of meat in townships

Abstract

This study investigated the factors which influence consumer preferences of meat in townships. This was done to better understand the consumer behavioural aspects of meat consumers in the informal market so that the right products can be presented at the right time in the right place at the right price with the right service. This process in return enhances customer satisfaction and brand loyalty which will lead to increased loyalty, sales in the long term and ultimately creating sustainability. Convenience sampling was used to select 300 participants from a total population of 87,701 people living in Ikageng, a township of Potchefstroom in the North West province of South Africa. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy measured 0.795 indicating that the sample size was adequate. Questionnaires were completed via interviews with the respondents by the field agent who are fluent in the home tongue and have a good business acumen. A total of 299 completed questionnaires were collected by the cut-off date. The major findings of the study were that the questionnaire used for this study was developed after an in-depth literature study was done on consumer preferences in formal markets. The main categories of the questionnaire were: quality, price, service, location, health, culture and religion, and presentation. However, after applying an Exploratory Factor Analysis on the data the following grouped factors were found to have the greatest effect on consumer preferences in the informal market. 67.71% of the Total Variance is explained by the following ten factors. The factors are: Quality (12.86%), Presentation (8.43%), Customer orientation (8.27%), Culture & Religion (6.62%), Specific choice criteria (6.28%), Visual stimuli (5.85%), Fat content (5.72%), Experience (4.88%), Post-purchase evaluation (4.67%) and Specific preferences (4.32%). The majority of the factors returned satisfactory reliability coefficients.