Environment & Brand Choice of GSM Handsets: An Assessment of the Purchase Behaviour of University Students in the Niger Delta

Abstract

The study focused to determine the nature of the relationship between endogenous and exogenous environmental variables and brand choice as it pertains to the purchase behaviour of GSM phones by University students in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. It also set to find out whether factors of personality, attitude, perception, learning, motivation, family, peer group, technology, competition, economic and socio-culture can predict brand choice. The survey method was deployed through the use of questionnaire forms – these were targeted at 6 Universities in the region using stratified sampling. Each University was limited to 100 forms; of 600 forms administered, 566 were successfully retrieved giving a response rate of 94%. Regression statistics was used to test the significance of the 11 predictor variables under enquiry at 0.05%. The outcome revealed the factor of ‘competition’ to be significant in predicting brand choice-making among student. ten (10) other factors were not, this is despite their positive correlation coefficients with brand choice. This led to the rejection of the null hypothesis in hypotheses 1 and 2 and acceptance of its alternate hypothesis which purports the presence of a positive relationship. The null hypothesis in hypothesis 3 was accepted given the significance of only one factor. The study recommends that brand managers of handsets should pay attention to other factors not just environmental such as customer psychographic variables and nature of products, etc., in addition to the factor of competition to enhance purchase. Also, CEOs of GSM Handset merchandizing enterprises should evolve better attention-getting strategies such as brand repositioning and rejuvenation techniques. Lastly, a model modification is necessary to add better value to the Environment-Brand-Choice Model used in this study.