Study Of Rural Consumer Information Gathering Behavior

By the leading of the Party and the government's polices relating to "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", the past four years witnessed an annual growth of more than 6% of the rural residents' income. Following the growth of the income, the Engel coefficient of rural residents is dropping year by year. At present, rural residents are moving their focus from food consumption to durable goods consumption, and begin to strive for the upgrading of consumption structure. Therefore, many enterprises are intensifying their efforts on market exploitation in rural areas in order to pursue their competitive advantages in rural market. However, because most enterprises don't have good knowledge of the features of rural residents' consuming behaviors, especially of the features of their information collecting behaviors, the desired results of their promotional activities can't be always achieved when they try to exploit the rural market. Therefore, I do this research on the features of rural consumers' information collecting behaviors, their influence factors and changing reasons by methods of comparison, document analysis and empirical research. The following are the main conclusions of the research:Firstly, because of the limitation of the factors such as reference groups. models and individual qualities, the information provided by internal information source are often very old and have a bad time effect, which will hamper rural residents' consumption and hinder their upgrading of consumptions.Secondly, by empirical research we conclude that:①The exterior information sources that rural residents usually use are word spread, advertisements on TV, shopping visit, sales manuals, personal selling, newspapers or magazines, broadcast and advertisements on bodies of car or wall.②Rural residents' most trustful information sources listed in descending order of importance are word spread, advertisements on TV, shopping visit, sales manuals, personal selling, newspapers or magazines, broadcast, advertisements on bodies of car or wall;③The information sources that rural residents usually resort to listed in descending order of importance are shopping visit, word spread, personal selling, advertisements on TV, sales manuals, newspapers or magazines, broadcast, advertisements on bodies of car or wall.④Rural residents' most dependent information sources listed in descending order of importance are advertisements on TV, word spread, shopping visit, personal selling, sales manuals, broadcast, newspapers or magazines, advertisements on bodies of car or wall.Thirdly, we find that the most important factors that influence the rural residents' exterior information collecting behaviors are economic factors, risk factors, personal factors and situation factors.