FACTOR IDENTIFICATION - AN ANALYSIS OF BUYER BEHAVIOUR DURING THE ACQUISITION OF AN ADVANCED MECHANIZED IRRIGATION SYSTEM

The article deals with consumer (farming) purchasing behaviour in the advanced mechanized irrigation industry. The consumer decisionmaking model by Engel-Kollat-Blackwell was used as a basis for the theoretical research, and principal factor analysis was the statistical technique employed to analyse the data. Ten factors (explaining an extremely high cumulative variance of 96.8 per cent) were identified from the rotated factor matrix, and ranked in order of importance. The first five factors, which is considered to be the most important factors (explaining a cumulative variance of 71.1 per cent) were labelled as "Financial planning", "Managerial aspects", "Environmental concerns", "Design aspects" and "Production potential". The five factors which is regarded as not so important were labelled "Return on investment", "Operational qualities", "Dealer orientation", "Service qualities" and "Past experience". Three major groups could benefit greatly from understanding buying behaviour within the advanced mechanized irrigation industry. Firstly, agricultural economists, financial institutions and other-advice rendering institutions would be able to increase the quality of their services to potential buyers (farmers). Secondly, farmers would be able to identify the pitfalls within their own reasoning when they consider the acquisition of an advanced mechanized irrigation system, while thirdly, the marketers of these systems would be able to increase the productivity of their sales personnel if they concentrate their sales activities on the more important criteria identified within this article