CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR ON FAST MOVING CONSUMER GOODS – A STUDY WITH REFERENCE TO PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS IN MADURAI DISTRICT

Consumer behaviour assumes much importance in the present consumer oriented marketing system with particular reference to ‘gender attention’. The FMCG sector consists of four product categories such as Household Care, Personal Care, Food & Beverage and Tobacco each with its own hosts of products that have relatively quick turnover and low costs. Every consumer is purchasing a particular product due to the influence of many factors. The influencing factors differ from one consumer to another and from product to product also. Similarly the brands which hitherto occupied a place in the minds of the consumers have started to disappear due to various sales promotion techniques and the quality brands from FMCG have slowly started to attract the rural consumers. Though there is a different ways and means to exhaust and to distribute abundantly produced personal care FMCGs products in markets, but the consumers in the market are influenced generously by responding to selling habits of retailers both in urban and rural market. In markets the consumers usually purchase what is available at the retail outlet. Therefore the producers of personal care FMCGs should progressively strengthen their distribution reach in the market. At the same time, there are some challenges such as poor distribution system, fragmented rural market and heterogeneity of population which the retailers ought to meet for satisfying the needs of consumers