FIELD EXPERIMENT STUDY

Field Experiment Study

Field Experiment to Test Consumer Behavior

Introduction

Brands are a complex pattern of relationships between companies and their products and consumers and their lifestyles. They arise not only from logo, slogan and advertising, but also from experiences, needs, ideas and opinions of consumers. They provide symbolic, emotional and constantly changing frame of reference for consumers to facilitate the orientation on the market.

Brands can be positioned on the basis of human qualities, such as sincerity (e.g., honest, down-to-earth), excitement (e.g., trendy, cool), competence (e.g., intelligent, hard-working), sophistication (e.g., good-looking, glamorous), and ruggedness (e.g., tough, masculine) (Aaker 1997). Brand personalities, defined as human characteristics associated with a brand, are an important element of the image for brands such as Apple (exciting), Cartier (sophisticated), and Harley-Davidson (rugged). Indeed, brand personality is one of the most compelling aspects of many popular brands. All these brand elements play a crucial role in influencing the behavior of consumers. The aim and objective of this paper is to design a research methodology to gauge the consumer behavior.

Purpose of the Study

The aim and objective of this study is to check the behavior of consumers. The context that would be used to conduct this research is to carry out a field experiment. The brand with which this experiment would be conducted is related to food industry. The aim and objective of this paper is to analyze whether the availability of the labels providing information about the food product changes the behavior of the consumers or not.

Background of the Study

Over the past few decades, mandatory labeling has taken on a new focus, which is to influence consumers to make product choices that meet social objectives. Two prominent social objectives have been addressing diet deficiencies of US citizens and targeting obesity due to poor diet quality. To this end, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (1990) was created which required that all manufactured food products display ingredients lists and nutrition facts panels which outline the nutritional content of the food. As a result of the NLEA, consumers are provided access to enough information to make healthier choices and have healthier diets.

In the current grocery market environment, then, nutrition labels play a dual role. First, they identify nutrition quality for consumers who need to make healthier choices; fulfilling a social objective. Second, they improve the search efficiency of consumers who want to make healthier choices; meeting a demand for information. The role of nutrition labels has gone beyond that of removing information asymmetries regarding food quality to one of advertising products with higher nutritional quality to interested consumers.

By recognizing this immense importance of labels of description this research is designed. Through this research, an attempt would be made to analyze its impact on the behavior of the consumers.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis for this research would be as follows:

H°: Unlabeled products (Campbell's soup) will highly be demanded by the consumers as compared to the labeled products (Campbell's soup).

Rationale for hypothesis

This hypothesis would enable to gauge the exact response of the ...