Developed Coastal Areas Farmers Market Supermarket Transformation - Analysis, Based On The Buying Behavior Of Urban Residents

The Wet Market Transforming into Food Supermarket campaign ("WMTFS" here after) launched at the beginning of 2002 in costal developed areas of China received much attention. As a brand new food retail form, it encounters many obstacles. From a purchaser behavior perspective, this empirical study tries to get implications for relative issues.The thesis is made up of 5 sections. The first section describes the background and sense of this study, the review and comments of existing literatures at home and abroad follow, and then the methodology of the study is introduced. In the second section, the transformation of food retail market after the foundation of the People's Republic of China is reviewed, the process and trend of the transformation of food retail market in foreign countries follow, which is mainly focused on North America & Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. By comparison, the feasibility of WMTFS in China is confirmed. The third section analyzes the relationship between WMTFS and food purchaser behavior, forwards that catching the food purchase behavior of city residents is the key point of the successful implementation of WMTFS. Section four is the empirical study section. At the beginning of this section, the literatures on food consumer behavior are reviewed, and based on the questionnaire survey of 550 food purchasers in Shanghai city and Hangzhou city, a consumer decision-making model is then built to analyze the microdata. The results indicate that the demographic characteristics of main food purchasers are female, middle-aged and above, married, belonging to a household of three people, with a monthly income of 1001 to 2500 yuan and received senior school education, and there are distinct differences in market segments of different age, marital status, household size, education and purchase place variables, and that the purchasers search sufficient interior information and limited exterior information in the process of decision-making and the marketplace is decided before the products. The study also employs factor analysis, which concentrates 10 external factors into 4 main factors that influence food buyer decision-making, namly relative group factor, product factor, price & promotion factor and other purchaser factor. Based on the results of factor analysis, 3 groups of food buyers are then determined using cluster analysis. Basic buyer behavior and demographic characteristics of each group are depicted. In section five, the management implications are therefore forwarded to facilitate the WMTFC implementation in costal developed areas of China.