Bottled water consumption - Dissertation Example

mental Issues associated with Bottled Water 17 2.3 Consumer Behaviour and Motivation 19 2.4 Perception 21 2.5 Decision Making 22 2.6 Conclusion 22 Chapter – III 25 3. Methodology 25 3.1 Research Design 25 3.2 Population and Sample 25 3.3 The questionnaire 26 3.4 Analysis tools employed 27 3.5 Conclusion 27 Chapter – IV 29 4. Results 29 4.1 Descriptive statistics 29 4.2 Findings 30 4.3 Conclusion & summary of findings 36 Chapter – V 39 5. Conclusions & Discussion 39 5.1 Implications 40 5.

2 Limitations of the study 41 5.3 Recommendations for future research 41 5.4 Conclusion 42 References 43 Appendix 47 THE QUESTIONNAIRE ON BOTTLED WATER 47 Chapter – I 1. Introduction Technological development and the demand for healthy living have brought about innovation of water being bottled in a standard nutritional method for consumption: in the place of the known tap water. The huge research and development on the part of the water companies has resulted in bottled water being termed to be distinct from ordinary water, also known as tap water.

The result of this has been a massive change of attitudes of the consumers towards bottled water as 57.1% of all water sales are bottled water sales. This development has skyrocketed the price of this product bringing the question of whether bottled water is a luxury or a necessity considering the cost of government spending and individual expenses on it within the present economic climate of the United Kingdom (The Times 2008). The global market for bottled water is stable and growing (Durga 2010).

A forecast of the global market for bottled water suggests that by 2012, it would assume a total market value of about $94.2 billion, which is a 41% increase since 2007 (Durga 2010). Figure 1 – Increasing Global Market Value of Bottled. This study suggest that respondents are aware of the pollutant effect of plastic water bottles, they do not entirely agree that this is enough reason to ban bottled water in the UK. However, in the event that bottled water would indeed be banned in the UK, respondents are willing to use a filter in order to make sure that although they will be consuming tap water, it will be cleaned from impurities.

This strongly suggests that most consumers of bottled water are paranoid about the safety of tap water. The percentage of respondents concerned about the safety of tap water is considerably high in this study, which leads to the acceptance of the hypothesis that bottled water is preferred for health reasons. This is in agreement with the findings of Saylor, Prokopy and Amberg and Doria, Pidgeon and Hunter who deduced that the "perceived safety of bottled water" and the "perceived risks from tap water" are major contributors to the preference of bottled water over tap water.

However, this study found that the perception that bottled water tastes better than tap water is not highly prevalent among bottled water consumers. A relationship was also observed between gender and buying behavior. Females in the under 25 years age group were found to be the highest consumers of bottled water. This finding is also in agreement with that of Saylor, Prokopy and Amberg. They suggest that women are more concerned with environmental health risks than men are, and this may explain the finding that women are larger consumers of bottled water.