An Analysis of a Bottled Water’s Design, Source and Brand and its Influence on Perceived Quality and ! Purchase Intention
!

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! “What !

you see is what you choose”

Anette Veidung Cand. Merc. International Marketing and Management Copenhagen Business School

Advisor: Judith Zaichkowsky Department of Marketing
Submitted: November 2011 Number of Characters: 181,518 Number of Pages: 98

Cand.Merc.IMM

Master Thesis

Anette Veidung

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“What you see is what you choose” (Clement, 2007)

With the largest bottled water market, Europe, maturing and competition intensifying it becomes increasingly important for the actors to stand out to the consumer. In order to stand out and capture the consumers’ attention the bottle design becomes an important mean of differentiation (Hoegg, et al., 2010). Especially because consumers’ tend to scan shelves in order to find the product that pops (Clement, 2007; Reimann et al., 2010). Furthermore, when confronted with a bottle design the consumer will have a perception about its quality and an intention of purchase. The purpose of this thesis is thus to uncover the relationships between bottled water’s design and the consumers’ perception of the quality of the water contained in the bottle as well as consumers’ purchase intention. Furthermore, this thesis also investigates how these initial decisions are affected through the introduction of additional information about the bottled water’s country of origin followed the bottle’s brand. The research design was exploratory in nature with descriptive elements and mainly used a quantitative research method. Empirical data was gathered though an online based survey, where 635 participants responded worldwide. The results show that there is a positive relationship between the visual attractiveness of a bottle and that of the perceived quality as well