Studying the brand personality perceptions of Café Coffee Day of differene psychographic segments of consumers

Abstract

Café Coffee Day (CCD) has undergone rapid expansion in recent past and is today India’s leading coffee retail chain. To sustain such growth and to take the brand to the next level of significance it is important to make the brand relevant to its target segment by developing appropriate brand personality and association. But this is easier said than done. Brand associations and personalities have been traditionally developed based on the demographic profile of the target segment. Brand Personality’s effect on the perceptions of the consumer has become important in creating associations to target the correct segment of consumers. In this project our aim was to explore the possibility of using psychographic and lifestyle segments to determine the various characteristics of Café Coffee Day customers and identify the variance in their perception of CCD as a brand. Totally, 85 complete responses were received to the online survey conducted through Qualtrics Survey Software over a period of 2 weeks in the month of August 2012. The Demographics consisted mostly of consumers in the age-group 23-27, both students and working professional among male and female, who are the major consumer segments of CCD. Psychographic segmentation is used because they are found to give focused segments by correcting for externalities in comparison with demographic segmentation. The respondents were asked to respond to a questionnaire of 24 statements based on the Kahle’s List of Values and Schwartz’s value theory. Cluster Analysis was done using SPSS software to find six psychographic segments- Traditional Conformists, Active Youngsters, Mature Socialists, Balanced Realists, Pleasure Seeking Individualists and Adventurous Leaders. The different perception of CCD’s brand personality needed to be found out to complete the objective of mapping to different consumer segments. Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale consisting of five major dimensions and 42 personality traits was used as the basis. To adapt to the Indian Context, few more personality traits like Kind and Sympathetic, Intense and Passionate were added to create a questionnaire consisting of 26 statements. The responses were subject to factor analysis using principal component analysis and Varimax rotation. The eight major dimensions were identified as Excitement, Sophisticated, Conservative, Caring, Sincere, Unique, Reliable and Original. Among all these, Excitement was found to be the most dominant brand personality of CCD which was perceived by the respondents. A cross tabulation was done to find out the perception of CCD’s brand personality by the different psychographic segments. This is done by mapping the different clusters of CCD consumer segments with their perception of the brand. Our results suggest certain consumer segments with psychographics and lifestyle which are in sync with CCD’s brand personality perception. Also some brand personality perceptions emerge stronger than others and such insights are analyzed to derive managerial implications.