Abstract :

India, the land of festivals, had always been a home to a variety of sumptuous sweets. Owing to several factors like increased disposable income, time-starved dual-income households etc., the demand for fast food has witnessed anuptrend. Besides freshly prepared traditional Indian sweets,cakes, pastries, packaged sweets had also been on upsurge. The present research attempts to analyze the conventional sweets market.Therefore,the consumer’s profile, decisional variables, and satisfaction with sweet sellers in Varanasi, one of the major cities of Uttar Pradesh, were studied. The study was conducted on the customers of major sweet sellers in Varanasi, which includedKsheersagar, Rajbandhu, Rajshree, and Bengal Sweet House. The sellers were selected for the study based on criteria of highest number of branches and customer base in Varanasi city. The study was an exploratorystudy based on primary data collected from 480 respondentswho were selected on a random basis through a structured questionnaire. Study concluded that consumers were satisfied with the sweet Consumers were satisfied with the sweet sellers in Varanasi on parameters of quality, taste, availability, price, and cleanliness. It was concluded that consumers had positive perception towards the sweet shops on all parameters under study, like product offered, service delivery and facilities which definitely raises high barriers to entry for new players. But it’s imperative that the sweet sellers should continue to add value to their customers as its key to sustained loyalty.

Keywords :

I. Introduction

Delectable sweets are an essential component of India’s diversified and rich food culture. Food market is witnessing the commercialization of traditional foods with consumer's focus on safety and healthalong with rich taste in food.Since time immemorial, a major part of milk has been used in India for preparing a wide variety of dairy delicacies, an unending array of sweets and other specialties from different regions of country following set processes. Over the millennia, these processes have largely been unaltered being in the hand of Halwayis, the traditional sweets makers who form the core of this cottage industry.                             

Sweets sector which has long been under the dominion of traditional Halwayis are witnessing new set of competitors from organized food sector. As the changesare sweeping in food as well as dairy sector alike, sweets market will definitely be affected by changing tastesand new players in offline and online market. The players in organized sector like Mother Dairy (milk cake, peda, gulab jamun etc) and Amul (kajukatli, doda barfi, rasmalai, gulabjamunetc) are already competing with traditional sweet sellers and lately online sweet sellers have joined the battle. The online sweet sellers include Big Basket, Zomato etc.More international players may make inroads in the lucrative sweets market as the players like Danone who are already operating in dairy market may diversify in related items so it becomes all themore imperative for the indigenous players to profoundly understand their customer and design the strategies for ensuring loyalty which will definitely act as a barrier to entry for new players.

The present study aims to understand and analyze the consumer profile, decisional factors and satisfaction of customers as regards sweet sellers in Varanasi.

Results and Discussions

Profile of the Indian Sweets Consumers

Knowing your customer is the first step to marketing success, especially when the industry is witnessing a major transformation in terms of new entrants and changing customer needs and priorities. The first step to design effective marketing strategy to ace the competition is to be familiar with the customer. To understand the profile of consumers the information was collected as regards average monthly expenditure on Indian sweets, gender, age, marital status, education level, family size, occupation, and source of information.

Monthly expenditure of Respondents on Sweets

Consumer monthly expenditure on a product when viewed in light of average monthly income indicates the importance attached to purchase related decisions. According to Belch & Belch (2009), consumers spend minimal effort on alternative search and evaluation for low-ticket items. The higher the importance, the more complex is the decision making for the consumer. As per Hoyer (1984) consumers are not willing to engage in much decision making when the product is insignificant.

The respondent’s monthly expenditure on dairy products was recorded in six expenditure ranges. It was inferred that 60 percent of respondents were spending less than Rs.1000, 12.5percent of respondents’ expenditure was ranging between Rs. 1001-Rs3000 per month, 7.5percentof respondents spent money in the range of Rs. 3001- Rs. 6000 per month, 0.83percent of respondents’ expenditure was Rs. 6001 to Rs. 9000 per month and 3.3percent of respondents spent Rs. 9001 to 12000 per month and 15.8percentof respondents’ expenditure was not defined.

The figure clearly indicates that 40 percent of customers spend more than 1000 on sweets on a monthly basis and those who spend less than 1000 revealed that they mostly consume home cooked sweets as they had limited budget. 

Table : Monthly expenditure on sweets by the respondents

Table : Gender-Wise Distribution of the Respondents

Out of the respondents surveyed 78.3percent were males and 21.7percent were females. It can be inferred that majorly males purchased the sweets but gender wise consumption pattern was not identified.

Table : Classification of respondents based on Gender

Table  : Age-wise Distribution of Respondents

Out of the respondents surveyed 10 percent respondents were below 20 years and 81.7 percent belonged to the age group of 20-30 years. Respondents in the age group of above 30 years were meager 8.3 percent. Age distribution of sweet purchasers is skewed to below 30 years as in Indian households’ young boys are assigned the task of purchasing groceries and daily household items, that is also the reason behind high number of male buyers.

Table : Age of Respondents

Table : Marital Status

Out of the respondents surveyed 92.5percent respondents were unmarried, and only 7.5percent respondents were married. The figure can be attributed to the fact that 91.7 percent respondents were below 30 years of age.

Table:  Marital status of the respondents

Table: Education level

From the data it is clear that most of the respondents hold master’s degree 50.9percent (244 in number), 30percent hold bachelor’s degree, 7.5percent were high school passed, 6.7percent hold the diploma degree, and only 5percent were having doctorates. This clearly manifests that people irrespective of their education level purchased and consumed sweets. 

Table : Educational qualifications of the respondents

Family Size

From the table it is clear that family arrangement has no role over sweets purchase and consumption, only impact can be seen in terms of quantity purchased as number of members are less in nuclear families.

Table : Family of the respondents

Occupation

Occupation plays a very important role in deciding a person’s consumption pattern. It was revealed that 78.3percent of the respondents were students, 10percent respondents belonged to service category, 4.2percent were involved in business, 2.5percent were unemployed, and 0.83percent were housewives. It indicates that most of the respondents who purchased Indian sweets were students, but that is not attributable to occupation rather to the fact that families’sign-up grown-up kids for general household works. Hence, it was found that in sweet consumption occupation has no role to play.

Table : Occupation of the respondents

Consumer Decision Dynamics

Source of Information

Out of 400 respondents 52.5percentselected sweet sellers based on recommendations of their friend and relatives, followed by 10percent respondents who were influenced by newspaperadvertisements, 9.2percent respondents took purchase decision being influenced bythe window display, 5.8percentwere influenced by selling efforts of shopkeeper, 5percent from the television and 0.16percent were influenced towards purchasethrough radio advertisements. Therefore, it was found that word of mouth largely influenced the consumer purchase of sweets.

Table : Source of Information

Ranking various factors affecting the purchase decision of the consumers

The consumers were asked to rank the factors affecting their purchase decision. It was found that quality acted as the prominent decisive factor effecting the purchase decision of sweets for almost 75.8percentrespondents, closely followed by taste which effected the purchase decision of around 74.8 percent of the respondents.As per the consumer rankings other factors were nutritive value for health, service, environment, packaging, quantity, brand, location, offer and discount, advertisement, and price.

Customer Satisfaction Analysis

Customer satisfaction is the difference between consumer expectation and perception of performance. The satisfaction level of Indian sweets customers was measured by analyzing their expectation and perception of sweet shops.

Expectation of consumers from Sweet Shops

The researcher tried to find out what consumers expected from the sellers of Indian sweets.The following table depicts the consumer expectation from sweet shops based on weighted average mean. It was found that 89 percent of respondents expected good taste from sellers obviously as sweets and confectionaries are consumed for taste which was followed by freshness for 87percentof respondents. Other factors in order were the Availability of product, attractive packaging and reasonable price. Packaging took a backseat as generally people purchase sweets for self-consumption except on festivals and occasions. Also, it was found that consumers attributed higher price as an indicator of high quality so price was not much of an issue in sweets.

Table : Expectation of respondents towards various aspects of the Sweets Shop

Conclusion

The study explored the dimensions of consumer profile, decision dynamics and satisfaction of consumers to discern the kinetics of dairy industry that is undergoing major transitions as regards indigenous players, new entrants and product categories as well. Sweets are pivotal to rich food culture on India. The results were consistent with the assumption that Indian households consume sweets irrespective of their monthly income. Households spent on readymade sweets and those who were low in income consumed homemade sweets.However, the demographic factors like gender, age, marital status, education level, and occupation had no impact on purchase and consumption pattern of Indian sweets consumers except the family size which merely influenced the quantity purchased.

The consumers of Indian sweets selected the seller primarily based on commendation of friends and relatives; hence word of mouth had a prominent role in influencing the purchase decision which is an outcome of consumer satisfaction.  The respondents unanimously attributed highest importance to quality and taste amongst the factors affecting the purchase decision of consumers regarding sweet sellers. While selecting sweet seller majority of consumers expected good taste and freshness of sweets while packaging and price took a backseat.

It was found that consumers had positive perception towards the sweet shops on all parameters under study, like product offered, service delivery and facilities which definitely raises high barriers to entry for new players. the sweet sellers should continue to add value to their customers as its key to sustained loyalty. 

Consumers were satisfied with the sweet sellers in Varanasi on parameters of quality, taste, availability, price, and cleanliness.

Implications
The study confirms some assumptions about sweet consumption and also brings to the fore some new findings that may influence the business strategies of the sweet sellers in Varanasi. The study imply that consumers spend regularly on sweets commensurate with their income, but at the same time high price of sweets is taken as an indicator of high quality. So sweet sellers may go for a two- way stretch to tap the customers across the income levels.   The demographic variables hardly influenced the sweet consumption but behavioral factors specially loyalty, occasion, usage rate etc. influenced the consumer purchase and consumption. Hence sweet sellers should adopt the strategy of behavioral segmentation. 

Sweet sellers need to connect with customers through word of mouth   as it flagrantlyinfluenced the purchase decision of the consumers as against traditional modes of advertising. The sweet seller should design their marketing mix with a focus on quality, taste, and freshness as these parameters were assigned greater importance by customers.

The study also imply that although consumers had positive perception towards the sweet shops on parameters like product offered, service delivery and facilities which definitely raises high barriers to entry for new players,  the sweet sellers should continue to add value to their customers as its key to sustained loyalty.  They should try to diversify their product offering and price ranges to cater to most of the market and raise the barriers for new national and international competitors.

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