Consumer Behaviour towards Pepsi, Cola: A Case Study of Karnal City

The Saga of Pepsi : There are many who feel that Pepsi had the first mover advantage in India. The second attempt was batter planned. On 9th Nov. 1987 the Government of India‘s Project Approval Board approved Pepsi Company‘s second proposal. Pepsi went on to become the largest selling soft drink brand in the country within a span of less than a decade. By the efforts of the global giant Coca-Cola and erstwhile Parle brands could only pale in comparison. Pepsi Company has interests in three areas - soft drinks, snack foods and quick service restaurants. Soft drinks include Pepsi Cola, Mirinda, and Seven Up, Slice, Pepsi Diet, Lemon Mirinda. Pepsi Company expanded its product line introducing Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Pepsi Light in International market. In the same period Pepsi Company launched its now famous “Pepsi Generation” advertising theme for the choice of a new generation.

Biel and Bridgwater (1990) conclude that the more relevant and meaningful commercial felt by people, the more successful was the campaign. The study further found that minor involvement and perceived relevance are factors linking commercial liking to persuasion in first case. Secondly, the novel approach, originality seems to have little to do with how a commercial will be liked. Unnava and Brunkrant (1991) told that number of exposure to adverts is held constant. They found out that varied adverts executions enhance memory for brand name over repeated same advert executions. The varied advert executions learning were superior to learning when executions remained the same. Brown and Rothschild (1997) conclude that the degree to which consumer memory for brands is affected by increasing level of advertising clutter. Irani (1998) said that many companies like Hindustan Levers Limited are entering for programs that can draw associations with the product in consumers mind. If the brand is successful in establishing its identity with a certain programs or quiz, recall potential for a brand can be very high e.g. Phillips top ten, Bournvita quiz, Close-up Antakshari etc are examples of the ―quiz craze‖. Singh and Cole (2001) compared the effectiveness of 15-second TV commercial with 30 second TV commercial by using novel commercials. 1. To know about the Consumer Behaviour Towards Pepsi Cola 2. To make conclusions and suggestions

The study-required data to be collected from two different sources that is, the primary source and the secondary source. The primary data was collected by means of a consumer survey designed to know the cognitive impact of advertisement on consumer‘s preference, recall and purchase behaviour. The secondary data was collected by doing a survey of advertisements appearing on electronic media like TV.

The population included all the consumers of all soft drinks who were exposed to TV advertisements in Karnal. It was decided to include in the sample the consumers representing different categories of age group and sex. For this purpose, the stratification of consumers was done on the basis of two attributes, age and sex. Two age groups, viz., 15-25 years and above 25 years, and two sexes viz., male and female were taken. Keeping in view the time and the resource constraint, the total sample size was taken to be 100. The convenience sampling technique was followed to select the respondent in such a way that equal number of male and female respondents are selected and almost equal representation is provided across each both the age- group viz., 15-25 years and above 25 years.

The study was conducted with the help of an undisguised questionnaire which was administered personally by the researcher to all the respondents. Unaided and aided Recall Tests were used to study the recall ability of the advertisements of Coke and Pepsi.

Information collected by means of questionnaire was processed into a master table. On the basis of this master table were constructed which presented tabular view of various parameters measured w.r.t. Sex and age. The questions related to the brand association were mainly true- false type and simple frequency and percentage method was used to analyse these questions. Some questions were on three points and five-point scale. These were evaluated by giving appropriate weight to the choices and mean scores of different choices were calculated. population is small and findings may not highlight the exact existing identity or efforts done to build it. • The results are based on data collected in Karnal City; thus they might not be true for other areas. • The study was mainly a one-person study, so all the limitation of one-person study like limitation of time, coverage, finance were faced. • Some of the data or the concepts may not be understood as the market terminology and the jargon is of the Indian markets.

Between sexes, the advertisement Mausam garam hai pepsi ke liye hum besharam haiis more popular among females because of the models. Among males the advertisements jo chaye ho jaye coca-cola enjoy and yeh dil mange moreabout it were equally popular. The recall ability of ―jo chaye ho jaye coca-cola” enjoy was 28% among the males, appeal of the advertisement being ‗the colour red‘.

In this test, respondents were provided with the names of the models and were asked to identify the brand names of the soft drinks with which they were associated.

From the table it is evident that the recall ability of Shah rukh khan is the maximum in the age groups, 98% in the younger one and 94% in the other with an overall high of 96%. Pepsi encased on this fact much before Coke could and took the benefit by advertising its products through the likes of Shahrukh khan and Sachin Tendulkar. Overall respondents in the age group 15-25 yrs have highest recall ability (87.4%) than the respondents in the age group >25 yrs who have 72.2% recall ability.

PepsiCo joins the rest of the country in keeping the victims in our thoughts and prayers, and offering support to their families and loved ones. PepsiCo, the PepsiCo Foundation, our employees and our bottlers have been actively supporting the rescue and relief efforts in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania through direct financial contributions and donations of foods and beverages. In addition, the PepsiCo Foundation has set aside $5 million for the relief effort. The Foundation is determining how to direct these funds in the most effective way to help address unmet needs of victims, their families and is responsible for buying a certain category of materials (i.e. ―bottles and closures‖ or ―paperboard and corrugated‖) for multiple divisions.

However in Karnal it is the market leader. Pepsi‘s main target is obviously to be the market leader and leave its nearest competitor, Coca-Cola, far behind. Pepsi drinks are available in almost the whole of India, this shows the importance paid to distribution. ―The Pepsi officials had given availability most importance. Today‘s consumer is very fickle. In a survey carried out by Pepsi, 70% of the respondents said they would switch over to another drink if they wanted.

Pepsi needs to improve upon its distribution strategy to get greater advantage over its competitor Coke because this is where the major battle for obtaining market share lies. Distribution means market coverage, with a wider coverage & easier availability of the product as compared to its competitor Pepsi is bound to get a bigger usage & consumption rate. The consumption of any aerated soft drink lies on this factor of availability and so it is important that the refueling of all retail outlets be done regularly to keep stocks always present. Pepsi could if possible come out with two different flavors of coke the reason being a certain section of the market finds the original Pepsi little sweet, so if a version of Pepsi is brought out which is less sweetened it may catch on to the market. Lastly it is important that the retailers price of Pepsi be controlled to a stable level. It has been often seen that retailers charge a higher price than what is the MRP of the product, if this can be controlled it is bound to increase the usage of the product. Increase of per capita usage in the market would in turn increase the rate of revenue generated.

Irani, M. (1998). Riding on the local boom, Brand Equity, The Economic Times, p. 5. Shrieber, R.J. and Appel V. (1991). Advertising evaluation using surrogate measure for sales, Journal of Advertising Research, 30 (6): pp. 27-31. Unnava, H.R. and Brunkrant, R. E. (1991). Effects of Repeating varied Advertising execution on brand name memory, Journal of Marketing Research, 28: pp. 406-16. www.pepsico.com www.cokewars.com www.demographics/marketingtoolspubs.com www.hbsp.com www.indiatimes.com

PGT, Commerce, Govt. Sr. Sec. School, Jundla, Karnal