A Study on Purchase Pattern of Cosmetics among Consumers in Kerala
Dr. Vinith Kumar Nair* Dr. Prakash Pillai R* Introduction Understanding behaviour of consumers is a key to the success of business organizations. Marketing personnel are constantly analyzing the patterns of buying behaviour and purchase decisions to predict the future trends. Consumer behaviour can be explained as the analysis of how, when, what and why people buy. Consumer behavior can be understood as: "The decision process and physical activity individuals engage in when evaluating, acquiring, using, or disposing of goods and services." (Loudon and Della Bitta, 1980). Nowadays, this phenomenon, can also be illustrated in the following way: "activities people undertake when obtaining, consuming, and disposing of products and services" (Blakwell, Minard and Engel, 2001). A study by Voss and Parasuraman (2003) suggests that the purchase preference is primarily determined by price than quality during pre-purchase evaluation. Given explicit quality information, price had no effect on pre-purchase or post-consumption quality perceptions. Instead, post consumption quality evaluations had a favorable impact on price evaluations. Another study by Chernev (1997) analyzed the effect of common features on brand choice and the moderating role of attribute importance. It is argued that when brand attributes differ in importance, with the best value on the most important attribute, thus further polarizing brands’ choice shares. In contrast, when attributes are similar in their importance, common features are likely to have an opposite effect, equalizing brands share. Russo and France (1994), studied the nature of the choice process for commonly purchased nondurables by tracking eye fixations in a laboratory simulation of supermarket shelves. The findings are fully compatible with the general view that the choice