Consumer attitudes and buying behavior in fast food restaurants: with special reference to Colombo City, Sri Lanka
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Attitude as one of the internal environmental factors, can affect a person's decision to purchase
the product. Consumer attitude is a response or assessment given by consumers consistently,
favorable or unfavorable, positive or negative, like it or not, agree or not to an object. Verdurme
and Viaene (2003) describe an attitude as the psychological tendency of a person to respond or
behave, in a consistently positive or negative manner with respect to a stimulus as a result of their
attitude toward that stimulus. Accordingly people are having negative or positive attitudes and
consumers may act against their own interest. Therefore proper understanding of consumers is
important to explore the consumer attitudes towards the buying behavior. Consumers’ choice and
buying behavior of particular products depend on many factors: as quality, variation, location,
price, environment, etc. The attitude plays a fundamental role in consumer behavior field, because
it determines his disposition to respond positively or negatively to an institution, person, event,
object or product (Azjen and Fishbein, 1980). The study stated how these consumer attitudes are
influences on their buying behavior. In present context, fast food restaurants and its consumption
are rapidly growing with the people’s hard-working professional living, and busy life styles in all
over the world. There are large numbers of fast food restaurants available in Colombo city.
Consuming fast foods has become a recent trend among upper society, teenagers and youth have
also increased and the fast food has won the palate of those groups.Ritzer (1996; 2002) and
Schlosser (2002) argue that fast food can be seen as a powerful symbol of globalization and post-
modern society and few countries of the world seem immune to its apparent attractions. The main
objective to assess the relationship between consumer attitude and buying behavior towards fast
food restaurants in Colombo city Sri Lanka. Secondary objectives are to find out the factors
influencing on consumer attitudes and most significant factor and salient beliefs which influenced
on buying behavior towards fast food restaurants.
Methodology
The target population of this study represents the consumers of the fast food restaurants in
Colombo city. There are 104 fast food restaurants in Colombo city, out of these 104 fast food
restaurants researcher selected 34 restaurants in order to represent the population size and 90
consumers selected from 34 restaurants. In this study primary data was collected through
structured questionnaires among the consumers of the fast food restaurants in Colombo city. In
addition Cronbach’s alpha test was conducted assures the reliability of questions. To analysis the
data descriptive statistic, correlation analysis, analysis of variance (one way ANOVA), and
independent samples T test and regression analysis were used.
Description
Keywords
Food Science, Management, Fast Food, Consumer Attitudes, Marketing, Entrepreneurship