Does the consumer awareness protect the exploitation? A Quantitative study in FMCG sector

Abstract

Consumer awareness is one where the buyer could take the right decision in purchasing all types of product. Marketers in view of earning profit, neglect the interest of the consumers and this leads to exploitation of the buyers. To investigate the current scenario, this study focused on the consumer awareness in the urban and rural area towards the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) along with the exploitation if any that existed in the market. For this purpose, 557 consumers who were using FMCG products residing in the western region of Tamilnadu were selected through cluster sampling followed by simple random sampling. To meet out the objectives, various statistical tools through SPSS 21 were applied and the result revealed that all the constructs like communication, price, labeling, promotion and unfair trade practices, if any remarkably influencing the consumer awareness. Also, labeling has a noteworthy mediating role between consumer awareness and satisfaction. But there existed a direct negative effect of consumer awareness on the satisfaction. It is suggested that marketers need to focus to fulfill all the rights of the consumers as detailed in the consumerism.