18. How much should a 500g package of good-looking automatically packed pasta of an unknown domestic brand cost to make you switch to it? _____________

19. What is the biggest disadvantage of manually packed pastas?
Poor quality Unknown manufacturer No guarantee on weight
Other ___________________________________________________

20. When you buy imported goods do you have a feeling that it is bad that we have to substitute natural gas for foods, cloths, etc.
Usually Sometimes Seldom Never

21. What are you?

22. Have the reforms performed in Russia been in your favor?

23. Do you prefer to buy clothes and footwear in the shop or in the market?

24. What are the members of your family?

25. What is your personal income?

26. What is the income per head in your family?

27. How old are you?

The results.

1. We revealed a negative correlation between income per head and consumption of pastas. The biggest part[8] of buyers were representatives of the lower class or the lower middles (31% and 33% respectively). 27% were higher middles, and 16% belonged to the high class. Since only pasta buyers were asked, the average consumption of pasta is lower than our research show, but nevertheless we can get an idea of structure of consumption of pastas. According to our calculations, the consumption of pastas per head is:

¨ Lower class- 0.6 kg/month

¨ Lower middles – 0.55 kg/month

¨ Higher middles – 0.32 kg/month

¨ High class - 0.13 kg/month

2. Only 12% of the respondents claimed they consume more than 1.3 kg of pastas a month per head. We can treat the lower class and the lower middles as the heavy half and the higher middles and the high class as the light half.

3. 36 % of respondents claimed they prefer corns to other pastas, 22%like spirals, 26% like shells, 7% prefer vermicelli, and 2% usually buy spaghetti.

4. 46% of buyers claimed the price to be the most important factor which influenced their purchase decision, for 37% of consumers the quality is the priority. 5% think they should buy only automatically packed pastas, and 3% claimed some specific features as taste (we should assume that good taste is a part of quality and that is why this group is small). There were also 4% of loyals who are driven by a familiar brand name while making their decision.

5. Usually people plan to purchase pastas in advance (87%). In spite of this, the decision about the particular sort and brand name (if there is any) is usually impulse (63%).

6. The crisis dramatically affected the market of pastas. We talked to the salesmen of pastas to shed light on this question. All of the salesmen we talked to said that before the crisis people preferred imported pastas to domestic ones. Now domestic pastas of low quality (37%) and middle quality (45%) are bought (according to our survey, not to salesmen). We expected changes to happen, but we did not expect them to be so huge, though LBS Corporation’s manufacture of pastas very notably increased since before August, 17^th .

7. The most desirable size of package is 1kg (57%), then goes a 500g package (38%).

8. People almost do not purchase domestic automatically packed pastas. Their price is almost equal to the price of imported pastas.

9. 72% of respondents said that they would prefer automatically packed pasta to manually packed one. 35% would do it because they are afraid of being given light weight, 19% do not like unawareness about the manufacturer, and 11% think the quality is poor.
In spite of this, people are not willing to pay much for packaging, though 82% of them agree that they would prefer automatically packed pasta to manually packed one. Only 9% were willing to pay more than 1 ruble for a 500g package, 24 % would pay from 0.6 to 1 ruble for a 500g package, 28% would pay about 0.5 ruble, and 10% would pay nothing at all (some even said they would prefer manually packed pastas because they can use the packaging).

10. People would not like to buy pastas in cardboard or other non-glassy packaging. Actually all of the respondents said they need to look at the product to estimate its quality.

11. Though people agree that imported pastas tend to be better than the domestic ones, most of them (67%) would not like to pay more than 25% more for imported pastas.

12. People do not worry a lot about the brand name. There are no hard-core loyals. There are a few split loyals (11%). They are among the people who still prefer imported pastas. The most popular brands are: Nordic (27% of imported pastas purchased were of this brand), Big (21 %). Non of the respondents was a loyal of any domestic trademarks.

13. Actually all people said that it is bad that Russia substitutes natural resources for industrial goods, but only 4% said they often think about it when they make their purchase decision, 7% said they sometimes do, 5% seldom think of this.

14. Since it was difficult for the respondents to answer weather they used to consume more or less pastas before the crisis (more than 50% could not answer at all or hesitated), we used the salesmen as our reserve source of information. According to them, the overall consumption of pastas decreased by approximately 15%, and consumption of imported pastas has just slummed- by more than 50%.

Conclusions.

Putting two and two together, we can state the following.

General findings.