Russian Consumer Behavior In South Karelia and Factors Influencing the Purchase Decision

The purpose of this study is to examine particular groups of consumers and their characteristics. The first objective is to gain an understanding on how the purchase decision process is being made from the viewpoint of a particular group of consumers. The second one is to research the variations of factors influencing the final purchase decision. The specific research group selected for the analysis are the existing customers of a tire distributor company Twinmax Oy. The theory part of the thesis starts with the description of the decision-making process. The stages of the process are presented and used as a basis for the analysis. Further on general factors affecting consumer behavior are investigated. These factors are also used in the empirical research. Marketing and consumer behavior related literature is used to support the theory part of the thesis. Additionally information is received from online articles. For the empirical part, questionnaire is used as a tool for data collection. Further on, consumer groups, which were specified by the case company, are derived from the total population of respondents. Those groups are analyzed and compared to each other considering the unique characteristics identified via the questionnaire. The set of characteristics to be compared is chosen based on the importance of the factors for the case company. The questionnaire results are presented in the form of generalized percentages in pie charts and tables. The information collected makes it possible to collect general information on the decision-making process and purchase influencing factors of target groups of customers. The type of analysis of the obtained results is descriptive. A general view on the results is presented, which does not give a strong statistical reliability