Behaviour Of Fruit And Vegetable Buyers On The City Markets In Croatia

Better knowledge of the consumer is the presumption for preparing the efficacious selling concept. Our research is limited on the preferences, requests, habits and attitudes of the consumers which are buying fruit and vegetable on the city markets in Croatia. The main goal of this research is identification and description of the different market segments based on the relevant buying characteristics of the consumers, that is their psychological, geographic and socio-demographic characteristics. The result of this research will be used as basis for the target marketing. We used mail survey method with structured questionnaire in this research. The survey was made in June 2000 on the random sample of 1000 buyers on the city markets in Zagreb, Rijeka, Split and Osijek. From 1000 questionnaires 568 were returned, 475 of them were included in research and the rest was discarded because of incomplete answers. Univariate analyse of questionnaire’s indicators shows that 93% of consumers buy fruit and vegetable on the city markets. Almost 60% of the consumers visit just one city market, while 63% of the consumers visit the city markets more times in a week. The average total satisfaction of the consumers with the city markets was 3.8, with the satisfaction scale from 5 (completely satisfied) till 1 (completely unsatisfied). The consumers are mostly satisfied with the fruit and vegetable choice (the average evaluation 3.92), and unsatisfied with the price/quality ratio on the city markets (the average evaluation 3.12). In the further research by help of the factor and cluster analysis we determined the fruit and vegetable market segments. We found 4 consumer groups which differ between themselves according to the psychological characteristics of the consumers. In order to describe these segments we detected differences between these segments according to the geographic, socio-demographic and buying characteristics of the consumers. The results of this research give the information’s base to the domestic fruit and vegetables producers to define a marketing strategy that is to plan marketing activities in city markets or in any other selling channel.