Attitudes of green tea consumers

Abstract

This study aims to find out what are the lifestyles and attitudes that consumers associate with green tea and how these can be used to build awareness about this growing category. The study also helps to explore to what extent the social environment and media influences the imagery related to green tea consumption in the minds of consumers. Brands must be able to successfully align their communication strategy with the various insights about these consumers’ attitudes towards the category and use factors related to lifestyle to target specific psychographics that prevail here. We believe that this is an extremely important way that they can differentiate themselves from other brands and make significant inroads into this nascent market, which the study aims to explore and highlight. Our approach to understand the current tea industry began by going through various published reports available on websites, journals, news articles etc. We further studied the current strategy used by tea brands to target appropriate segments and identify the drivers of green tea consumption. An in-depth literature survey of personality, attitude and lifestyle to gauge their impact on consumption habits was done, after which a detailed questionnaire was formulated and floated to both users and non-users of green tea as a product. Analysing a sample of 80 consumers (41 non-users and 39 users), we came up with insights which point to the fact that there do not seem to be significant differences in attitudes towards ads and products, but significant differences were seen in attitudes towards lifestyle and various aspects of fitness. It also pointed to the fact that non-users are not convinced by various arguments such as the antioxidant properties, as well as a few alternative forms of communicating the same. We recommend a series of three campaigns which target both users in order not to alienate them from the brand as well as two types of non-users namely housewives and students, given the differences in their online behaviour and the propensity of digital WOM in building opinions about the brand and the product.