MARKETING DE GERAÇÕES: CONSTRUÇÃO E TESTE DE ESCALA PARA AVALIAÇÃO DA MARCA DE REFRIGERANTE COCA-COLA POR JOVENS NA FASE DE TRANSIÇÃO ENTRE AS GERAÇÕES X e Y

Abstract

The young consumer is considered one of the most important segments to the soft drinks market; witch makes important the knowledge of their behavior as consumers. Therefore, traditional brands in this market segment have the goal to better communicate to these consumers, associating their brand image to the consumer’s life style and supporting an image for their generation. The main goal of this research is to present the proposition and test of a scale to evaluate the Coca-Cola brand by the consumers that are situated between generations X and Y. In this sense, people between 18 and 26 years-old took a part as the study population, considering the recommendations of Mowen e Minor (2003) that this is the correct age cohort to represent the line between the generations in the Brazilian population, taking into account the year that the data was collected. Firstly, an exploratory study was carried out with the goal of item generation for the measurement scale. Secondly, the scale fine-tuning and validation were performed. The results point out to the existence of content validity, unidimensionality, reliability and convergent and discriminate validity for the dimensions of the proposed scale. The findings also indicate a unidimensional construct composed by facets related to “beliefs related to the brand image”, beliefs related to the company image” and “actual and future intentions”.