Behavioral aspects of male grooming category

Abstract

The project tried to find out the important factors that are responsible for shaping consumer attitudes towards the men’s grooming category. The study analyses the difference in attitudes of the high involved consumers and the low involved consumers. Study has been conducted by taking into consideration the category as a whole rather than any particular brand. Through this study, we have analyzed various dimensions that influence the attitude towards the brand, advertisement and the product across the high involvement and low involvement groups. The study explored the relationship between brand experience and social currency factor and found a significant positive relationship between brand experience and social currency (WOM dimension). the study found out there is no variation in the claims for the attitude towards the ad on the basis of presence of affective or rational claims in the ad. However, on the dimensions of brand believability, the involved consumers are influenced by perceived quality, brand familiarity and brand expertise in the respective order. In addition to this, highly involved consumers were confident about the claims by the brand if the claims contained a general utilitarian benefit. And low involvement consumers had favorable attitude if the claims had terminologies like actifair peptide, coffee bean extracts etc. On the study done with the credibility of endorsers, a comparative study was done between – a sportsman, a celebrity and a common-man. Purchase intention was significantly higher when a sportsman was used in the advertisements. However, within the high involvement category, there was not much significant difference between attitude towards ad or towards brand by any of the endorsers. On further exploration, the important endorser characteristics for a sports star are found to be attractiveness and trustworthiness. Moreover, study was done to find out how do consumers react to a brand extension by a brand which primarily was established in the market as a female grooming product brand. An analysis showed that the highly involved consumers seemed averse to purchase products form such brands. Also a gender personality test conducted on deodorants revealed that the highly involved consumers perceive it to be highly masculine and face creams are perceived to be feminine by all. We saw that both highly involved and lowly involved consumers process the information heuristically. So, the male consumers for the grooming category undertake a holistic approach of the brand communication