Investigation of the Personal, Social, and Economic Factors Influencing Consumer's Utility in Choosing Milk Packaging, Case Study: Rasht City

Packaging is considered as one of the sale attractions and motives. The impacts of socio-demographic variables on the customers’ selection procedure are conceptually interesting and have several managerial interests. The present study aimed to identify the effective personal, social, and economic factors in choosing milk packaging type in the Rasht City. To this end, the options were categorized into 4 groups including “milk without packaging”, “bagged milk”, “packet milk” and “bottled milk”. Data were gathered using a questionnaire and some interviews with people. Multinomial Logit Model was used as research method. The results of Hausman test indicated that the 4 groups of milk packaging were independent of each other and, therefore, the nested structure was not required. Results obtained from model estimates showed that age, gender, family size, educational level, and income variables were statistically significant. Among the variables, “family size” negatively affected selection of other alternatives over the reference group (bagged milk), while other variables had positive effect. Finally, marginal effects were calculated for all variables and for each group. After calculating the marginal effects for all variables of each group, it was observed that the dummy variable "gender" had the most marginal effect in packaged milk group.