Evaluation of Consumer Attitudes Towards the Ice Tea Category in Greece

The purpose of this project is to understand consumer attitudes towards the Ice Tea category, as well as the interrelations between Ice Tea and other Liquid Refreshment Beverages (LRBs), and discover new ideas along with new occasions that will grow the consumption of Ice Tea in accordance to seasonality. Given the assumption from client having the company maintaining at least current market share levels, the expected benefit deriving would be the growth of Lipton Ice Tea sales by growing Ice Tea category. Referring to the above statement, the competitive landscape scheme within Ice Tea category shall not be examined, but only against other LRBs. Since Ice Tea sales increased during 2013, an upward trend in consumption seems to be a fact. The client (PepsiCo-IVI), is the leader but has been recently exposed to some competition by newly entrants, Greek companies that keep earning their market share due to economical prices and the origin of final product. All respective members of team have researched several models of consumer behavior and ended up using the Hawkins’ model since it gives a holistic view of the consumer behavior and the way purchase decision process could be affected by internal and external factors. For the purpose of data collection both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied which resulted in interesting findings that guided members to alternations that needed to occur. One of the aforementioned was the segmentation and positioning of the category resulting from the analysis of various factors and attributes that derived from the usage of Marketing Engineering for Excel (MEXL). Having the results of all aforementioned as foundations the team proceeded to the formation of recommendations, promotions and occasions that if followed should result in desired goal.