Factors Affecting Brand Preference. The Case of Beer Brands in Nekemte Town, Ethiopia

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 3.65, Wollega University, course: Marketing Management, language: English, abstract: Now a day¿s marketers are struggling to increase their brand preferences by customers and trying to avoid competitors from grabbing of these acquired customers mind. The purpose of this study was aimed to examine the factors affecting consumer brand preference of beer products in Nekemte Town. The study tried to identify the influence of eight determinant factors of brand preference on beer consumers. This study adopted explanatory research design supported with deductive research approach.

The population of the study comprised beer consumers in the town. Convenience and purposive sampling techniques were used to trace the final respondents. Data was collected from 351 respondents by using a five-point likert scale structured questionnaire. Correlation and regression analysis techniques were employed to calculate the magnitude of association among the study variables and to determine the percentage of change caused by the explanatory variables on brand preference. The finding from the association analysis reveals that the explanatory variables were statistically significant and associated with consumers brand preference for beer products in Nekemte town. However, the finding from the causation analysis reveals that four predicting factors i.e. product price, product availability, situational variations and social media were statistically significant and their coefficient of determination (R2) equals to 0.627, which indicates that 62.7% of the variation that occurred in the consumer¿s preference of beer brands was explained by the model, while the remaining perceived quality, promotion, social factors and brand image were statistically insignificant at (P<0.05). Based on these findings, the researcher recommends that Heineken Brewery Share Company (HBSC) which wants to be on the cutting edge of competition was advisable to develop effective pricing strategy to make their product price affordable for beer consumers, and it was better to use social media advertising strategies which emphasize on creating awareness and leaving a positive impression on their pages in order to increase consumer¿s preference for the company beer brands and improve their positioning.