Consumer Innovativeness and Consumption Behavior of New Sauce Products for the Japanese Consumer / 대한지역사회영양학회지

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: This study analyzed Japanese consumers on their sauce consumption, and assessed the relationship between consumer innovativeness and consumption behavior for new sauce products. METHODS: The survey was completed by local consumers visiting Korean restaurants in Osaka, Japan, in September 2018. The demographic characteristics, consumption of sauce, consumer innovativeness, and factors of theory of planned behavior were evaluated. Totally, 150 collected data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0 Program (IBM SPSS INC, Armonk, NY, USA). RESULTS: Results of the survey indicate that Japanese consumers purchase a sauce by considering the taste and food utilization. Sauce purchases were maximum at mega markets and supermarkets. The consumer innovativeness for Japanese consumers was based on 3 factors ‘Purchasing adventurous products (3.51 ± 0.96)’, ‘Active information seeking (4.36 ± 1.11)’, and ‘Interactive information seeking (4.33 ± 1.02)’, where the tendency of ‘Active information seeking’ was the highest innovativeness factor. Furthermore, higher values of perceived behavior control (4.68 ± 1.21), attitude (4.66 ± 1.41) and subjective norm (4.39 ± 1.28) were revealed, when assessing for theory of planned behavior factors. Correlating the variables of consumer innovation and factors of planning behavior theory, ‘Active information seeking’ is a positive attribute for attitude (p<0.016), subjective norm (p<0.001), and perceived behavior control (p<0.002). These 3 factors also had significantly positive effects on purchase intention for new sauce product (p<0.000, p<0.000, and p<0.002, respectively). Attitude was determined to be another very influential variable for purchase intention of a new sauce product (B=0.484, t=6.881). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study determine the consumption patterns of sauce for the Japanese consumer, and the relationship between consumer innovativeness and consumption behavior for Korean traditional sauces. We believe the data generated from this study will help determine a marketing strategy to enter the Japanese market.