Purchase behavior of consumers in emerging markets

This thesis consists of three essays regarding the purchase behavior of consumers in emerging markets (EMs). The first essay focuses on one of the most important issues in marketing, namely pricing. A comprehensive analysis of price elasticities is conducted for a large set of brands and categories in China. The essay presents a framework for the moderating effect of category and brand factors, some of which specific to an EM setting, which is then empirically tested. In addition, it documents the relative importance of price versus three other key marketing instruments (advertising, distribution, and line length) in an EM. The second essay studies whether Chinese consumers attach different quality beliefs and/or uncertainties to global versus local brands, and investigates how important quality and uncertainty are in driving brand choice, for these brands. Moreover, differences across consumers with different geographic and sociodemographic profiles are explored with respect to both their global versus local brand quality (uncertainty), as well as to the importance of quality (uncertainty) and other marketing mix instruments in brand choice. The third essay looks at how the rise of e-commerce in grocery affects brand performance. It formally shows how a brand’s total (online plus off line) sales change as the fraction of groceries sold online goes up, and identifies brand and category factors that drive this evolution, thereby providing insights to brand managers on how to benefit from this online trend.