The Categorization of Chinese Consumers Considering Purchase Behavior and Shopping Channel for HMR Products

This work sets out to investigate purchase behavior of Chinese customers with respect to HMR(Home meal replacement) products and categorize them. In this study the main stress falls on multichannel selection according to their purchase behavior and demographic characteristics. And it mainly focuses on the question of what kind of factors influence on purchasing the HMR and how to classify the customer groups based on the consideration attributes. We surveyed 170 Chinese customers who had used HMR products for the past twelve months, ranging from 20 to 69 years old. In order to characterize the customers, 22 factors were selected by earlier studies and brainstorming. The result was organized by factor score from K-mean clustering method, Chinese consumers were clustered into four groups. They are listed here as follows; (1)group focusing on major supermarkets, (2)group focusing on online stores, (3)group focusing on many different types of offline stores, and (4)group for cross-channel shopper. Customers who had purchased HMR products and obtained the related information mainly from major supermarkets were classified as Group 1. Customers who had evaluated various factors for buying the products and mainly used online stores were classified as Group 2. And customers of Group 3 were purchased the products by many types of offline stores, contrary to the Group 1. Lastly, in Group 4, customers had trend of purchasing based on cross-channel shopping for various purposes. They were especially sensitive to price changes to select a purchase channel.