Browsing by Subject "wooden furniture"

According to the Statistics Finland the Finnish furniture industry’s value of production sold in 2012 was around 762 million Euros, of which wooden furniture accounted for about 72 %. In 2012 approximately 85 % of the production was sold in the domestic market. Therefore, Finnish furniture industry has a great interest to understand for which kinds of product attributes the Finnish consumers are willing to pay. This study examines the Finnish consumers’ willingness to pay for different quality characteristics of wooden furniture from the consumers’ demographical background point of view. The aim is to highlight potential customer segments in the wooden furniture market in Finland. The survey data was collected for a joint study project of the Finnish Forest Research Institute and Pellervo Society during the summer 2004 in Eastern Finland from two different sources: home retail centres selling building materials and the annual home construction fair. The survey data consists of 147 form interviews of Finnish consumers of 18-75 years of age. In the survey the respondents were asked to express the importance of different attributes of wooden furniture in relation to the price of product in the scale 1-7. The interviews were carried out using the Exit-technique, which means that the survey data is being collected in the vicinity of the examined object so that the interviewers may clarify the questions and present concrete examples related to them if necessary. Statistical analysis of the data was performed using the SPSS software. Cross-tabulation and mean were used as statistical methods in the research. According to the results the most important attributes for the consumers in relation to the price of wooden furniture were appearance, use properties and technical quality. The least important attributes were brand name and image of the producer. Environmental friendliness was the fourth least important attribute for the consumers of the 12 attributes, and somewhat surprisingly, older generations were more willing to pay for it than the younger generations. The domestic origin of the wooden furniture was very important attribute for consumers of over 40 years of age. The results indicate that the consumers are distributed to different segments depending on their demographic background factors, which should be taken into account in the manufacturing process as well as in the marketing and sale actions of wooden furniture.