Research Study on the Impact of Bottled Water Packaging for Consumer Buying Decision in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

The bottled water market has shown a huge increase over the last years, locally and globally. More specific, the global bottled water market has grown with 44% and the local market with 62% over the last five years. The problem of the study was to find out the way of bottled water package influence on the consumer buying behavior. The main objective of the study was to examine the impact of the bottled water package on consumer buying decision in Sri Lanka. The theoretical framework was based on the secondary data (articles and books) and included core concepts of bottled water packaging, packaging elements, consumer behavior, consumer perception, and consumer attraction. The Quantitative method was selected for acquiring and analyzing the research results. Quantitative data was collected from 100 questionnaire responses and was analyzed with the SPSS Version 19. By examining the consumer behavior, it was found out that packaging element such as, color, size and shape and product information play a key role in decision-making and ensure consumer’s attention. Therefore it is recommended that bottled water producers/marketers should focus (more) on these consumer groups, since they seem to be the target groups of the bottled water. However, since only packaging elements, demographic and psychological factors are investigated, further research with other influencing factors is recommended to gain more insights. So bottled water package performs an important role in marketing communications, especially in the point of sale and could be treated as one of the most important factors influencing consumer’s purchase decision.