Giving Opens The Way For Receiving!! ... A Microscopic View Into Selection Of Tea Brand In India

Tea has played a role in almost all cultures and customs. The Indian Tea Industry is about 176 years old. Satisfying customers’ wishes is a challenge for many companies in the today’s rapidly changing and keenly competitive environment in today’s Tea industry. In this experiment with, seven product attributes of tea where each attribute has three performance levels have been designed for conjoint analysis. The first influencing factor is the preference of the type of tea where packaged tea has the highest utility as it captures the maximum of Tea market in India as compared to loose or tea bags which are mostly not preferred by the consumers. As consumers are very loyal towards the Tea brand which they purchase and hence we can see the most important criterion or influencing factor while selection of tea is the Brand name followed by the family opinion as traditionally the family believes to have a good taste of tea which should act a stimulant and psychological preference and family preference does matter when purchasing a tea. The pricing is the fourth important factor influencing the choice of tea. The most preferred attributes for tea are Variety of tea should be leaf with medium pricing where selection criterion of tea is good taste and brand name influences the consumer the highest and Tea should preferably be present at all General Store Outlets and preferred convenient packaging for consumers is Carton Boxes.


INTRODUCTION
Tea has played a role in almost all cultures and customs. The Indian Tea Industry is about 176 years. The fulfillment of customers' wishes in a profitable way requires that companies understand which aspects of their product and service are most valued by the customer. A thorough knowledge of customer needs is even considered to be the foundation on which a company is built (Mohr-Jackson, 1996). It's an important task of a company's marketing department is to create a profit maximizing bundle of product or service attributes or in other words a profit maximizing value proposal. The main question which has to be answered ishow to use the limited resources of the company in product and service design and development to maximize its profit.

LITERATURE REVIEW
For understanding customer needs and studying them systematically it is necessary to be familiar with the concept of creating value to the customer. Walters and Lancaster (1999) have stated that value is created by any product or service attribute, which motivates the customer to buy the product and takes him closer to achieving his goals. Attributes of a product or service that create value to customers can be divided into (Woodall, 2003): 1) Factors that enhance customer's benefits or help to satisfy his needs, 2) Factors that decrease customer's costs.
It is pointed out that brand can create value to customers (Best, 2002). And of course there usually are industry specific factors that customers perceive as valuable. Customers usually name many factors as needs. It is reasonable to organize them into a hierarchic structureas the first order, secondary and if necessary also the third level needs. To estimate the importance of customers' needs most frequently simple 5-or 7-point rating PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020)57 (9): 6066-6076 ISSN: 00333077 6067 www.psychologyandeducation.net scales are used. Often, the result is that customers consider most of factors identically "extremely important" (Gale, Wood, 1994).

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Total respondents of 150 were selected consisting of Consumers, Retailers, Distributors, C&F, Employees involved in the Tea Brand distribution chain to whom the Questionnaire has been administered and relevant information through Interview process face to face, skype and telephonic process with each was done to collect the relevant information for the research paper.
In our research paper we have focused on psychographic & behavioral segmentation variables using Conjoint Analysis followed by CART Analysis (Decision tree) to understand perceptual mapping to understand the important brand and the attribute contemplated by the consumers and retailers with respect to tea in India

OBJECTIVE:
 To study the factors effecting the consumers when choosing the tea brand  To study the market preference of the tea brands and what strategy to used when entering the market  To study the factors effecting the retailer perception when selling tea product The factors effecting the purchase decision of the consumers when choosing the tea brand.
 Understanding the customer specifications for increasing the customer value towards a Tea Brand.

DATA ANALYSIS 4.1 FACTORS AFFECTING CONSUMERS' CHOICE
To study the first three objectives PerMap software has been used and the results are as follows: Two things are observed: (1) The objective function is which is also known as error function, it bespeaks how distant the objects are from a good configuration. When multiple points are plotted on the perceptual map, we may not be able to correct the distance between them. There is always a scope of error which is indicated by Objective Function Value. The software by default diminishes this error. The objective function value for attribute rating for retailers is 0.023880. The value of R 2 for this attribute rating is 0.955 (2) In Permap the characteristic which are tested for are the vectors. The arrows are called attribute vectors which shows the direction in which the magnitude of that particular vector is increasing. The radius of an object from the arrow indicates how closely it is related to that characteristic. Had there been only one characteristic which is tested for then all the object would be on the same vector line. Since many attributes are tested at once the alignment of objects is adjusted to indicate its closeness correctly to each every vector attributes.   With respect to Price Attribute the highest and closest to vector is Wagh Bakri followed by Double Diamond, Red Label, Tata Tea, and Society.
With respect to Retail Offers Attribute the highest and closest to vector is Double Diamond followed by Wagh Bakri, Red Label, Tata Tea, and Society. With respect to Variety of Product Attribute the highest and closest to vector is Red Label followed by Tata Tea, Society, Wagh Bakri and Double Diamond.   As per attribute rating of the retailers Red Label is ranked first preference followed by close preference for Tata Tea and Wagh Bakri alike, the third in preference is Society and the last in preference is Double Diamond. Wagh Bakri has scored top ranks in price showing price as the penetration strategy to increase market share followed by importance on promotional strategies like consumer offers and retail offers and with good distribution network which ranked first among the brands in terms of availability of the brand in the retail outlets. Hence based on attribute rating we can conclude that competitive pricing, efficient and timely distribution network, promotional strategies for both consumers and retailers are driving factors for tea brands to increase the market share in India and offer tough competition to the top players in the Tea industry. The objective function also known as error function, it indicates how distant the objects are from a good configuration. There is a scope of error which is indicated by Objective Function Value. The software by default minimises this error. The objective function value for attribute rating for retailers with respect to customers' preference for a particular tea brand is 0.023246. The priority on which customer's preference of a particular tea brand from a retail outlet is as follows: Availability, Taste, Quality, Packaging, Loyalty, Price, Brand, Colour, Content, Production and Social belonginess. Most important areas which needs to be focused accordingly is availability and efficient distribution network, Quality of the product including taste and packaging is very important for any tea brand to sustain in the long run. Figure 12: Retailer perception towards selling tea brands

FACTORS CONSIDERED IMPORTANT BEFORE TAKING A DECISION TO KEEP RANGE & BRAND OF TEA IN THE RETAIL OUTLETS
The objective function value for attribute rating for retailers with respect to customers' preference for a particular tea brand is 0.000031 The priority on which Retailers keep a particular tea brand in their retail outlet is as follows: Timeliness of service, Customer Demand, Product Quality, Merchandizing, Extra Benefit, Foresight, Goodwill, Product Innovation and Inventory Management. Most important areas which needs to be focused accordingly is availability and efficient distribution network, Quality of the product is very important for any tea brand to sustain in the long run. Retailer correlate with the customers or the retailers do as per customer needs and requirements. Hence the first priority is on timeliness service of the product delivery on time (ie supply chain) should be strong and product should be as per customer preferences.

CUSTOMER SPECIFICATIONS FOR INCREASING THE CUSTOMER VALUE TOWARDS A TEA BRAND
Conjoint analysis means constructing and conducting particular experiments among consumers in order to model their decision making process. As the name suggests, potential customers are asked to make judgments about the attributes that affect their purchase decisions conjointly, rather than evaluate each attribute individually. Analysis allows finding out which product attributes create most value to a customer and how customers are likely to react to different product configurations. This information can lead to the creation of optimal value propositions. The research setting is made quite close to actual decision making in a real market: where the customer's task is to rank the different product alternatives which are offered to him and pick out the one that creates most value for him. Whereas ranking is based on personal preference to different attributes of every product alternative.

SELECTION OF VARIABLES & SAMPLE SIZE
PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020)57 (9) Interview process face to face, skype and telephonic process with each was done to collect the relevant information for the research paper.

RESULTS OF CONJOINT ANALYSIS
Based on Delta value and rank attached to product attributes single performance levels have been calculated. It was found that on average the most important attribute for customers is the preference for the type of Tea (Packaged Tea, Loose tea or Tea Bags) followed by loyalty towards Tea. This result is logical because the people always prefer packaged food to loose and the packages tea in Nagpur occupies between 65-70% of the total tea market segment. Tea is a morning stimulant and an essential indispensable factor of every household and hence people mostly don't experiment much when purchasing a Tea brand and hence Loyalty is the second factor influencing the customers. Next in importance are the influencing factor (brand name, family opinion and advertising) and pricing attributes, which form 3 rd and 4 th level of importance for customer's purchasing decision. The relative importance of the six attributes to all customers is on the individual level shown in TABLE 1 below From the figure below the first influencing factor is the preference of the type of tea where packaged tea has the highest utility as it captures the maximum of Tea market in India as compared to loose or tea bags which are mostly not preferred by the consumers. Where the Company sells the convenient packs in Carton Boxes which we again see that in types of packaging carton boxes have been the most highly preferred followed by pouchs & Jars. As consumers are very loyal towards the Tea brand which they purchase and hence logically we can see the most important criterion or influencing factor while selection of tea is the Brand name followed by the family opinion as traditionally the family believes to have a good taste of tea which should act a stimulant and psychological preference and family preference does matter when purchasing a tea. As it is a day- to-day item people generally and traditionally prefer to purchase it from the General Store outlets situated close to their residence. As consumers are very loyal towards a tea brand, hence advertising does not have much influence in selection of Tea brand as also can be seen from the figure below.
The pricing fourth important factor influencing the choice of tea where High (Rs.300-400 / Kg), Medium (Rs.200-300 / Kg) and Low (Less than Rs.200/kg) where consumers prefer not premium pricing nor low pricing but medium pricing preferable for all segment of customers.

Figure 13
Mean of SN ratios

Main Effects Plot (data means) for SN ratios
Signal-to-noise: Larger is better The most preferred set as shown in figure above is Variety of tea should be leaf with medium pricing where selection criterion of tea is good taste and brand name influences the consumer the highest and Tea should preferably be present at all General Store Outlets and preferred convenient packaging for consumers is Carton Boxes.

CART ANALYSIS
Classification and Regression Trees (CART) give an intuitive way to model data. They can be used to construct models, but they are also very useful in exploring data. In particular, when a predictor has numerous levels, CART modelling can be used to group those levels into broader categories.

Figure 15: Regression Tree Analysis
The rating given by consumers to the profile set derived from Taguchi model is used to determine the category most affecting the consumer choice for tea selection. From above we can clearly see that Criterion selection and Preference of type of tea are two most important factors effecting choice of consumers in India.

CONCLUSION
As per attribute rating of the retailers Red Label is ranked first preference followed by close preference for Tata Tea and Wagh Bakri alike, the third in preference is Society and the last in preference is Double Diamond. Hence based on attribute rating we can conclude that competitive pricing, efficient and timely distribution network, promotional strategies for both consumers and retailers are driving factors for tea brands to increase the market share in India and offer tough