Impact of Consumer-Centric Marketing-Mix on Purchase Behavior of Non-Core Food Items: An Empirical Study of Urban Subsistence Marketplace

Abstract

The objective of this study is to identify bundle of food items which are non-essential in context of poor consumers and analyze the consumption spending on these non- core food items. This study yields an impact of consumer centric marketing-mix for these non-essential or non-core food items on food purchase decision for urban bottom of the pyramid (bop) consumers.Based on the a survey of six hundred respondents this study was conducted in six selected slum areas of delhi. Thereby, based on the exploratory factor analysis existing scales of marketing-mix was refined for the non-essential food items leading to a regression model for determining the impact of marketing-mix on food purchase behavior at urban subsistence marketplace.Non-core food category includes the Beverages, Refreshment and Packaged processed food. Key finding emerged as redefined marketing-mix, comprised of four factors namely Expected Product, Convenience, Price Insensitive and Non-Social Sources, and had significant and positive influence on BOP purchase behavior of non-core food items.For managers, this research suggests a set of guidelines for designing marketing-mix for non-core food items in consumer sensitive manner.This study will lead to increased understanding about consumption behavior of subsistence marketplace thereby allowing various marketers to efficiently engage consumers which may lead to inculcating a long forgotten market into the mainstream economy and improving the standard of their living by providing significant choices.This paper makes an original contribution in direction of revival of existing western marketing-mix based on the BOP consumer survey. Given the absence of empirical and quantitative studies in BOP segment, this study marks a stepping stone towards obtaining generalized marketing-mix model.The food items consumed by BOP market is further pronged into two categories- Core and Non-core Food items. This study is limited to redefining the marketing-mix elements for core or essential food items. This study was conducted in densely populated urban slum areas of Delhi.