Explaining fish consumption in Sri-Lanka: The role of consideration set size, attitude, knowledge, convenience orientation, price consciousness, and variety seeking tendency

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study to understand how the consideration set size affect for consumption frequency of fish in Sri-Lanka. Consideration set size of fish is considered to be affected by consumer attitude, convenience orientation, and consumer knowledge in Sri-Lankan context. Thus, the second objective was to investigate how consumer attitude, knowledge, convenience orientation, variety seeking tendency and price consciousness affect the formation of consideration set size. Based on that, it aimed to suggest a marketing strategy implication for food marketers, in addition with strategy implication for increasing fish consumption. The proposed conceptual frame work was used to achieve the objectives in this study. Thus, the proposed model consisted with the constructs of attitude, knowledge, convenience orientation, variety seeking tendency and price consciousness. This thesis was an extension of Rortveit and Olsen (2007: 2009) study with the inclusion of additional antecedents of variety seeking tendency and price consciousness. The questionnaire survey was carried out in Galle district in Sri-Lanka with the convenience sample of 250 respondents. The measurement scales used here were adopted from previous studies found in literature. The confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling in Amos 16.0 were used as statistical analysis tool. It was found that significant positive relationship between consideration set size and fish consumption frequency as a main hypothesis. Further, this study has found significant positive relationships between knowledge and consideration set size, between variety seeking related to personality and variety seeking related to food and between convenience orientation and consideration set size, while having insignificant relationships between knowledge and fish consumption frequency, and between variety seeking related to food and consideration set size. Surprisingly, attitude has an insignificant effect on both consideration set size and the consumption frequency of food. The main reason for this problem is skewneess of the data set. The study found that that belief of sensory aspects, health and convenience were significant predictors of attitude toward fish. Further this study revealed that price consciousness related to food has a negative significant impact on consideration set size. These findings indicated that from a marketing point of view, being chosen is effected by the size of the consideration set size, food marketers should advocate that consumers consider many kind of fish products in choice occasion. As shown by the study, set size can be increased through the consumer knowledge variable. In such a condition, manufacturer must tend to put in to consumer education which will lead to have a positive impact on consideration set size. From the theoretical point of view, this research contributed to fill the gap in the consumer consideration literature in general, but also to the literature trying to explain fish consumption in Sri-Lanka. A limitation of this study is that the relationship between the consideration set size and the consumption was only tested for the size dimension of the consideration set. Further more, sample is relatively small and they are not statistically representative to the total population in Galle district or Sri-Lanka. Therefore, the results could not be generalized to Sri-Lanka.

Keywords: Consideration set size, attitude, convenience orientation, knowledge, and variety seeking tendency and price consciousness, fish consumption, Sri-Lanka.