People consume the same product in many different contexts. For example, they drink beer by themselves, with close friends, on the beach, when playing cards, or when tailgating before a ball game. As these contexts change, people's motives for consumption change as does the importance of product attributes, resulting in different brands being selected in different usage contexts.
This study adopts a motivational perspective to examine the role of motives in explaining within-person variation in brand preferences. The conceptual framework is loosely based on the means-end chain model (Gutman 1982), which predicts that products are selected based on their ability to offer benefits a consumer seeks in that given usage situation. More specifically, the within-person variations in brand preferences across usage situations are captured through the influence of person-situation specific motives on brand attributes. The mathematical model presented in this study is based on the economic framework of utility maximization and discrete choice. Usage situation enters the utility function through brand-associated marginal utility. Consumers are rational and choose the brand that gives the largest value. Further, the brand attribute importances are not only individual specific but also usage situation dependent, which are modeled as a function of consumer motives inherent in the context.
Data have been collected from a national survey and field study of consumer off-premise beer consumption. A total of 842 people from 6 different geographic markets participated in this study conducted by the Miller Brewing Company. Information obtained includes preferred brand sets under a specific usage context, brand choice ranking, product attributes, and consumer motives of beer drinking. The model employed in this study also accommodates two complications in field studies. First, partial ordering of consumer preference is analyzed to cope with the estimation of individual preferences for a large number of brands. Second, a method is developed to cope with the difficulty of conducting a conjoint study on well-established brands where the manipulation of attributes is counter-intuitive. Finally, a specification test is laid out to examine the sufficiency of motives under study in capturing situational influences.