Tuesday 5 June 2012

Brand Preference of Motorbikes

Brand Preference of Motorbikes: A Study on Student Segment.

G.Suryanarayana Reddy and P.Govinda Reddy
The Geographic Teachers, India, Vol.5, No.1, 1998/1999,
The student segment is the most important for the two wheeler industry.  It is at the student stage, they first buy and use a brand and this encounter may influence them at later stages.  It is important to understand what factors the students’ value and weigh most in purchasing different brands.  This information will help in proper product positioning for this segment.
A sample of 40 male students in the University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India was selected. They were in the age group of 20 -24 years.  All of them were familiar with different brands of motorbikes.  We have developed a set of 19 constructs and added the key construct “purchasability of the brand” to these constructs to form a questionnaire.
In the questionnaire each construct was given 7 possible responses one representing “far worse than competing brands” and response seven representing “far better than competing brands”.  Each respondent was given one questionnaire at a time and asked to write the name of a brand of motorbike on the top of the questionnaire and evaluate the constructs on the brand.  We have selected five brands of motorbikes – Suzuki Samurai, Kawasaki Bajaj 125, Hero Honda Splendor,  Hero Honda CD 100ss and Yamaha RXG.  Each respondent answered five questionnaires.  So we collected 40x5= 200 questionnaires.
These questionnaires were stored on the basis of brands of motorbikes. For each brand, we had 40 questionnaires.  These scores of 40 respondents on each of the 20 constructs, we got a data matrix with 20(No. of constructs) x 5 (No. of brands) items. The data were factor analyzed to condense 20 constructs by the method of principal components with Vari Max Rotation.  SPSS package was used for this.
The factor analysis has given rise to four factors. Factor loadings less than 0.6 are ignored in the analysis.  Factor one seems to represent easy maintenance on the vehicle and horse power.  Factor two represents price.  Factor three can be described as representing safety in driving.  Factor four can be called as representing comfort and look.
We have totaled the scored of all the respondents on all constructs having significant loadings in each of the factors and arrived at the average score per respondent by dividing the total by the number of respondents.  The maximum range of these average scores is 1 to 7.
On factor one, the maximum average score is for Suzuki Samurai and least score is for Hero Honda CD 100ss.  The respondents considered Suzuki Samurai as the best and Hero Honda CD 100ss as the worst on maintenance and horse power.  On price factor they considered Suzuki Samurai as the best and Yamaha RXG as the worst. On safety, the respondents ranked Kawasaki Bajaj 125 as the best and Suzuki Samurai as the worst. On comfort and look, the respondents considered Yamaha RXG and Hero Honda Splendor as the best and Hero Honda CD 100ss as the worst.
The study indicates that the primary constructs the student segment considers in making brand selection of motorbikes are the price of the brand and the mileage it gives.  These constructs are pivotal in determining the product positioning strategies for the student segment.

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