Abstract:
The tea sector has potential to contribute considerably to economic development of Sri Lanka. The production and manufacturing of black tea is of higher importance in this regard. Moreover, in a competitive market arena, the way the product is presented to the customer is also noteworthy. For instance, black tea inner cartons are offered to consumer in many forms and it should be presented in attractive forms to catch the consumer favor to the product. The study was done for find the effect of selected packaging attributes (Color, Size, Material, Image) on the consumer buying behavior and find the relationship between social economic factors of the consumer and the tea inner carton buying behavior. 300 consumers who purchase tea with inner cartons in the Colombo district were taken for the study. Appropriate supermarkets were selected using Judgmental sampling technique while consumers were taken using convenient sampling technique. Primary data were collected by administrated structured questionnaire among the respondents in the sample. Conjoint analysis was performed to rank the importance of the packaging attributes and to find the best combination of attribute levels. Accordingly, the consumers prefer image and color of the packaging to size and material of the packaging while the most preferred combination of packaging attribute was dark color, large size package with traditional image and artificial material. Most of the consumers prefer green, blue, yellow, black and red color inner cartons respectively. Research study recommends that manufactures should focus on the image of the package more than other attributes while giving more emphasis in producing inner cartons having dark color, large size package with traditional image and artificial material.
