engleski

Beer as a retail product category from perspective of younger adult consumers – the gender analysis

Beer as a product category in Croatian and European retail is more and more complex. There are more and more suppliers that offer an increasing number of brands of beer and, within individual brands, they provide customers a growing selection of packaging, which means that the complexity of the definition of assortment and pricing policies within this category becomes more and more complex. One of the most quoted definitions claim that category management is a process which treats product categories as business units that can be adjusted at the store in order to meet consumer needs. The majority of analysed theoretical sources agree that consumers and knowledge on their behaviour are the starting point of category management in retail. Another important issue in retail category adjustment is the application of the gender approach in analysis of habits, preferences and consumer buying behaviour. There is a scarcity of research papers dealing with particular retail products categories at particular markets from the perspective of particular consumer groups. Therefore, in the primary research we scrutinize purchasing habits of younger adult consumers as a specific retail consumer group and we are focusing on Croatian retail market within one particular product category. The aim of this paper is to highlight the main characteristics of females and males as younger adult retail consumers of beer in Croatia. The characteristics are described in absolute and relative frequencies and illustrated by histograms, while the difference between males and females are tested with Chi-squared test. The results given in this paper can be useful for category management of a beer as a retail product category and as the basis for the efficient adjustments of the specified retail category to young females and males. This is the research article.

Retailing ; Category Management ; Product Categories ; Beer ; Young Consumers ; Consumers’ Attitudes ; Croatia

nije evidentirano