Pairing of Customer’ Satisfaction with Brand Consciousness and Price Sensitivity (A Feminine Study in Pakistan on Beauty Care Products’ selection, Use and Satisfaction)

This research study targets the role of brand consciousness and price sensitivity in relation with satisfaction of females with their selected beauty care products. Data is collected from both working and nonworking females via quota sampling primarily and convenience sampling as sub sampling. Responses of 108 females are collected via online Survey. In presented model, Satisfaction is appearing as dependent variable whereas Brand Consciousness and Price Sensitivity are appearing as independent variables. Gathered data is analyzed while using Correlation Coefficient and Multiple Linear Regression. Results indicate a strongest relation of brand consciousness and price sensitivity along with satisfaction and females association with their selected beauty care products. Significance of this research is that manufacturing companies can use its results in order to enhance their marketing related efforts regarding this category of their brands especially with the context of Pakistani females.


INTRODUCTION
Since prehistoric era, both males and females are consuming beauty care products in their own ways to look presentable, elegant, conspicuous and sophisticated.Apart from this vary fact, females are still considered to be more inclined towards use of these products.Even since early nineteen century, definitive beauty is portrayed with a female character "Cinderella" in every culture extracted from Chinese primitive tales (Miller, 2008).It's a natural phenomenon to enhance physical appearance in order to get attraction (Adams, 1977) so same is true for Pakistani female as well because here also females are inclined to use rigorously all beauty care products including hair, body and face care products.Pakistan's beauty market is just like the one of any underdeveloped country but here, hair care and skin care products are capturing maximum share as penetration has been reached up to 90% (Manto, 2011).
This study reveals how working and non-working segments of Pakistani females perceive about beauty care products available in Pakistan in this current era.Since start of twenty first century, skin and body care products are abundantly used by all Pakistani females owing to successive media spread.In Pakistan, prices of these products are categorized into two prominent price tiers.First tier is covering all beauty care products of "mass fairness" and their average price is PKR 1.25/mL.The second tier is covering "mass premium fairness" with price range of PKR 4.00/mL and above (Manto, 2011).Currently, both local as well as international players are playing in this market and presenting their products in above said categories.In former category, English Fairness Cream, Care Beauty Cream and Honey Lotion, Bio Nikhar, Tibbat Snowwhite Cream and Fair & Lovely Pakistan and many more are available whereas in later category, Olay international, Pond's White beauty, Revlon Honey Lotion, L'Oreal Whiting, Garner and few others are available.Both categories have their own settled markets and serving well while gaining their due market share.Along with many locally owned companies, top six global entities are offering their beauty care products in Pakistan like Avon, P&G, Unilever, L'Oreal, Beiersdorf and Colgate (Manto, 2011).
Eventual purpose of consuming every beauty care product is to obtain an appended fairness and beauty by every female so beauty is also considered as an economic, cultural and social series of affective process (Coleman and Figueroa, 2010).Since in Pakistan region, weather touches its extreme at least two times in a year so females are certainly concern about their skin tones.Tagged fairness is considered to be a great symbol of beauty and females adopt it as a common social trend and start using beauty care products from their teen age.Regardless of social class and age brackets, rarely or frequently all females use beauty care products in one form or the other also they designate their satisfaction in their own personalized manners.Although marketers are always involved to launch new and enhanced products in beauty care industry but due attention is given to only those products which serve their users in multifunctional ways.Females also relate beauty care products as antiaging agents so they always demand a perfect beauty image from a single product.Marketers even use females as symbol to promote enhanced features of their products as firm believe is, higher is the satisfaction from any brand, greater is the economic return associated with that brand (Yu, 2007).
Females do have psyche to look superior while having price comparison and brand prestige description of their own selected brand so they always try to decide radically about their chosen beauty care product (Johnston and Taylor, 2008).
Selection of beauty care products by females is also reflected as a stance of female's personality.Type of personality is related in the use of beauty care product and it is generally considered if a female is using same product since a long time she is brand conscious and she will appear at lower level of new product adaptability."Up-to-dated" females try new products once after their immediate launch while showing their socially aware attitude (Andrew, 2011).
As media also plays a vital role while providing awareness of any product at mass level so manufacturers also try to consume it as a perfect source of product related message spread especially in case of beauty care products, marketers even launch same campaigns in more than one territory (Castañeda, 1997).
Objectives of the study: This research has been conducted while keenly aping all above mentioned aspects and having defined objectives as: • To examine impact of brand consciousness while selecting beauty care products • To review the effect of price sensitivity of females while selecting beauty care product • To measure the females' ultimate satisfaction level with their selected beauty care products

LITERATURE REVIEW
Customer's satisfaction with after the use of any kind of product appears differently for all customers.Marketers always try to search out the patterns of customer's satisfaction after launching their products.Many careful studies have shown two prominent aspects of customer's satisfaction as cognitive perspective and emotional perspective.Former one explains the perception and expectations about the value of product or services received by the customers just after acquiring the same (Oliver and Swan, 1989) whereas later one explains the customer's emotional state after consumption of the product or services.Since consumption experience may be positive or negative so as emotional state about any product or services.
Collective view of both perspectives shows satisfaction as a perceived value associated with any product or services (Bolton and Drew, 1991).In another view, satisfaction is simply lying at lower end of customers' expectations after buying any product (Kristensen et al., 1999).
Females have always showed tendency to use beauty care products when they exposed themselves in society.Various studies has depicted that females have this perception that attractive personalities are greeted in more good manners than unattractive ones.Same is linked with professional as well as personal status of individuals as well (Godoy et al., 2005).In Pakistani territory, here also females use beauty care products while having some defined purposes in their mind like to minimize aging effect, to make their skin fresh and shine, to give smoothness to their skin or sometimes as part of their makeover (Syed et al., 1996).Again here female's thinking is to enhance overall personality image after enhancing their physical attractiveness (Dion et al., 1972).One more deeply observed psychological aspect to use beauty care products is that physical attractiveness also enhances interactive characteristics of individuals which uplift their sociability, ecstasy, intelligence and elation (Miller, 1970).This influence of transcendent beauty is pervasive enough that it is right away considered as "what-is-beautiful-is-good" (Eagly et al., 1991).Females also feel that self-confidence and selfpreservation can also be enhanced with attractive personality so the use of beauty care products is obvious (Featherstone, 1991).
To bring "uniqueness" in personality by using beauty care products is another purpose to use beauty care products by many females.Human body acts as a social symbol while exposing the image of self-identity so in females view point, to what extent they have to expose to the society, up to that extent they need to enhance their physical personality.Behavioral aspects of female's personalities are also become enrich after due enhancement in their personality (Thompson and Hirschman, 1995).Every female is lean towards improvement in her personality both in body and face so they adhere towards the use of various cosmetics specified for this function.Beauty care products manufacturing firms promise to cater females such needs perfectly and as a result they earn good profits (Askegaard et al., 2002).Once females are indulged in use of a specified beauty care product they establish emotional attachment with that product and they strive for having continuous innovativeness in that chosen product (Tzou and Lu, 2009).
Females urge for a permanent and everlasting beauty image and for that they frequent use beauty care products.Consideration is given; continuous use of selected beauty care product gives everlasting personality boost (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky, 2006).In Pakistani vicinity, recurrent usage of beauty care product is also considered to be a symbol of "White Face" as said by Webster Jr and Driskell Jr (1983) that "actual model of female beauty lies in white".It is also assumed that continuous use of beauty care products also brings a confident emotional feeling of every day new beauty image (Norman, 2004).Already white females inclined to use beauty care products in order to pertain their skin shine.As studied by Sahay and Piran (1997), already whiten face tones bring females in inferiority complex if they turned darker owing to any outer effect.
Despite from the fact that beauty care products manufacturing firms are trying to catch female customers through rigorous campaigns even then females are now educated enough that they select their products very consciously.They show their conscious in the manners that they prefer to listen about their selected products from their family members, age fellows or from friends instead of believing on media campaigns.A Japanese study shows, although presented ad campaigns present beauty care products in best possible manners but females select these products with due consciousness and even after consulting with their fellows especially when they are going to select any product first time (Barnes and Yamamoto, 2008).A current study conducted by Pakistani scholars also shows, media is playing its vital role while giving consciousness and awareness to the females of all age groups in order to select their best suited brands in order to enhance their body image (Ali and Shahwar, 2011).
Females also select their beauty care products with due consciousness because they feel emotional attachment with the product if they are satisfied with it (Ashmore et al., 1996).In Pakistan territory, females are facing two very common skin related issues including acne and hyper pigmentation.Women is covering more than 50% population in Pakistan whereas 70% from total female's population is consisted on the ones who are below 30 years out of which almost half are facing acne and hyper pigmentation problems.So females always strive to select their beauty care products very consciously in order to get multiple benefits while saving their skin from these two issues along with desired fairness (Barry, 2011).
Many manufacturing companies are campaigning about their beauty care products while enhancing relation of price paid for the product along with associated benefits of the product.Grabe et al. (2008) Advertisements sometimes affect females in the way that firstly they become attracted towards advertised product and later on they gain knowledge about that and ultimately they spend on that product while liking benefits of use along with their spending (Downs and Harrison, 1985).One argument presented by Murray (2012) shows, females becomes almost least concern about the price of any product when question of their self-image comes.They pay up to their maximum buying power in order to reduce their own psychological feeling about their uninviting personality (Richins, 1997).Media also conform benefits of spending upon selected beauty care products in a ways that actual beauty icons of current era is presented in the ads while relating benefits of advertised products with their beauty.This creates psychological attachment while having good effects in mind and females pay rigorously to attain prescribed benefits (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982).All those beauty care products which endorse their quality cost along with features for which they were selected create positive brand experience through emotional association with the product (Aaker, 2011).Apart from price sensitivity, positive association and stimulation induces females for repeat purchase of one same product (Craig et al., 2009).
While discussing the case of Pakistani community, since open use of beauty enhancement products is not fully emerged also here females is part of a decreasing economy so females always pair associated benefits of any products with the cost paid very consciously (Barry, 2011) In the light of above mentioned literature review, following research question is addressed in this imperial study.
"To what extent female consumers are satisfied with the purchase and Usage of Beauty Care Products in Pakistan?"Derived from conceptual framework, a hypothesized model is depicted in Fig. 1.

Theoretical framework and hypothesis generation:
As model is showing, there are two independent variables including, brand consciousness and Price Sensitivity of the brand.Satisfaction is appearing as dependent variable as mentioned by Helgesen (2006), "customer satisfaction is perceived as a dependent variable according to the common suppositions when doing such an analysis".

Price sensitivity Customer's satisfaction
To answer the research question while detecting directions of causality among variables in the model, following hypothesis has been drawn: Brand consciousness and brand trust are harmonized factors in facial exposure (Fan and Xiao, 1998;Liao and Wang, 2009) so hypothesis one is postulated: H 1 : Brand Consciousness of any beauty care product has a relationship with satisfaction Price sensitivity decreases when expected perceived value increases (Anderson, 1996) so hypothesis two is postulated: H 2 : Price Sensitivity of the product has a relationship with satisfaction

METHODOLOGY
This is primarily an exploratory research study and claims to institute a causal relationship understanding among the variables important for females while selecting their beauty care products.
In order to address the stated research question, research questionnaire was designed which was focused on indicators generated from theoretical framework.Five points Litert-type scale was used in questionnaire to measure multi-item constructs as used by Danaher and Haddrell (1996) and Oliver and Swan (1989) in same studies.Responses of 108 females were collected aged from 16 to above 41 covering both working and non-working based on Non-random sampling.

DATA ANALYSIS
Cronbach's Alpha score was measured to determine the reliability of the used questionnaire.It was done to determine the internal consistencies (Collis et al., 2003) on two stages, firstly it was measured at pilot testing stage when responses of 12 respondents were measured and their reliability was found to be 0.86.Scales that showed values of Cronbach's Alpha coefficient as greater than 0.7 are considered to be reliable to measure the same underlying attribute (Duran, 2011;Nunnally, 1967).So the tool was considered to be reliable.After collecting responses of 108 respondents, same test was carried out again and Cronbach's Alpha coefficient was found to be 0.79 as minimum limit and 0.86 as upper limit.Values of all three variables are falling between these two limits as mentioned in Table 1.
Table 3 shows the education level of all sampled females ranging from Intermediates to Masters here, maximum No. of females are falling under Masters Category collectively from Working and Non-working side.
Table 4 shows the age range of females in the sample and as mentioned, maximum No. of females are falling between age range of 31 to 35.
Table 5 shows monthly speeding of all females under study and it shows, maximum females are appearing under lower slab of this category while spending Rs.150 to 300 on their beauty care products monthly.-------------------------Working females  ----------------------- Pearson correlation analysis: Overall results of Pearson correlation are presented in Table 6.Results show, For H 1, A strong and significant relationship was observed between Brand Consciousness (BC) and Overall Satisfaction (OS) with any beauty care product for both Non-working and Working females (r = 0.539**, p = 0.000), (r = 0.510**, p = 0.000) respectively.This reflects a strong liking that a female was high in her brand consciousness will also be high in overall satisfaction with the product.Another highly significant relationship was observed for H 2 and it was between Price Sensitivity of the Product (PS) and Overall Satisfaction (OS) with any beauty care product.In Non-working females highly significant relationship was observed as (r = 0.511**, p = 0.000) but a significant and moderate relationship was observed in working females for this same aspect (r = 0.377**, p = 0.005).This reflects a strong liking in non-working females but a moderate liking in working females that a female was high in her price sensitivity of the product will also be high in overall satisfaction with the product.
Results were further verified and hypotheses were tested by using Multiple Linear Regression Analysis as under.
Multiple linear regression analysis: Multi Linear Regression Analysis was used to examine the relationship between the continuous variables under study.One time linear regression was used to determine the relationship of Brand Consciousness (BC) and Price Sensitivity (PS) of the beauty care products with female Customer's Overall Satisfaction (OS) for working females and same was repeated for non-working females.
Hypotheses, H 1 , related to Brand Consciousness (BC) and H 2, related to Price Sensitivity (PS) of the product were showing significant relation with Overall Satisfaction (OS) of females both in Working females as well as in Non-Working females with non-exceeded significant value of 0.05 (Pallant, 2001).Standardized coefficients for non-working females are, BC, β = 0.415 (ρ = 0.002) and PS, β = 0.253 (ρ = 0.047) whereas in working females these values are, BC, β = 0.390 (ρ = 0.002) and PS, β = 0.339 (ρ = 0.007) which shows, both BC and PS are affecting female's satisfaction for both categories (Table 7).This indicates, while being satisfied from any beauty care product, brand consciousness and price sensitivity are the biggest indicators.
In Multicollinearity check, Values greater than 5-10 for VIF and tolerance level of less than 0.20 or 0.10 are often considered as signifying multicollinearity (Lodorfos et al., 2006) so here VIF value is 1.241 and tolerance is 0.806 for working females whereas for nonworking females, VIF is 1.097 and tolerance is 0.911 so final model is fit while having no multicollinearity among the tested items (Table 8).

Collinearity statistics
Overall fit of the model: While explaining the overall fit of the model, R is 0.2991 for Non-working females and 0.383 for working females, these values show the correlation between BC, PS and OS (already observed in correlation test) means if BC and PS will be high, OS will also be high.The value of R ² is 0.299 for Nonworking females and 0.383 for working females which tells BC and PS accounts for 29.9% in Non-working females and 38.3% count for working females to be satisfied with their selected beauty care product.There might be some other factors as well that contribute female's satisfaction with their beauty care products but this model explains 29.9% satisfaction from BC and PS for Non-working females and 38.3% for working females (Table 10).

DISCUSSION
Both hypotheses were supported by the primary data gathered from structured questionnaire.These hypotheses were postulated in order to judge females selection and use criteria for their beauty care products along with its relation with their satisfaction.All results show significant relationship of Brand consciousness and Price Sensitivity of the product with satisfaction so both hypotheses are accepted.Since, Consciously selected brands itself become sources of satisfaction as mentioned in study of Schurr and Ozanne (1985) so H 1 is tested here after getting support from this study as positive stated relation is there among brand consciousness and satisfaction.This postulation is also supported by the studies of Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Alemán (2001) which also shows, brand trust behind selection of any products pair with user experience and define the ultimate satisfaction with the product.
Good experience with the brand tolerate the price sensitivity and customers are not price conscious when they pair benefits of the product with the price paid as mentioned in study of Sethuraman and Cole (1999) and Zeithaml (1988).Hence H 2 is tested which states that price consciousness has a relationship with satisfaction.

Whole
research findings reveal, brand consciousness of any beauty care product is the primary factor that determines the actual satisfaction with any beauty care product.A consciously selected brand makes females' beliefs more strong about the positive facts of the products when they are associated and tested with actual experience of the product.Consciously selected brands are also allied with Price Sensitivity of these products so; Price Sensitivity of the product appears as secondary causal factor, as it pairs the actual benefit gathered from any product with the cost spent to acquire that product.Second factor associated with satisfaction of females along with their brands is, as long as brand consciousness gets high, females start less bothering about price of the product.Again if nominated benefits are high from any products, females pay for that accordingly.While checking this same fact from ANOVA analysis, "F" value is appearing under significance of p<0.001 for both working and Non-Working females (F = 10.641 for Non-working females and F = 16.171 for working females), so maximum model fit can be observed while showing a defined relation of BS and PS with OS.While checking overall model fit it is clear, although other factors do have some impact on satisfaction behavior of females as model is covering 29.9% factors for Non-working females and 38.3% factors for working females but actual measure of female' satisfaction is the brand consciousness and price fit.In addition, brand consciousness about beauty care products also lead females towards presentation of improved social image along with self-satisfaction.Thus, female consumers' satisfaction with their beauty care products seems to be inferred from their brand consciousness along with Price Sensitivity of the product.
This, Overall, influence of brand consciousness is seems to be more significant confirming the view of number of authors about the same fact (Bloch and Richins, 1992;Chao and Schor, 1998) For managers, implication of this research study could appear in the form of more enhanced advertisements of beauty care products while exposing motives of real beauty among celebrities and pairing their beauty with their brand consciousness.
This study is also applicable for all the beauty care manufacturers and distributors in Pakistan who are producing or distributing their products throughout the Pakistan while targeting Pakistani females of all age groups and social classes.From this study, they can get information about females' perception about their beauty care products use and they can purposefully develop their products while keeping in view both brand consciousness and price sensitivity for these products.

LIMITATIONS OF RESEARCH STUDY
This research is focusing on to determine the factors affecting satisfaction of female consumers only, means this research study is mainly targeting half of the population as males are not addressed in this study.This research study is also steering satisfaction with a specific class of products only, although inferences from this research may be implementable on other products as well but model of this research is limited to the type of products on which it is applied.Also research implications of beauty care products are may not correspond to other markets.
Secondly, this study was conducted solely in Pakistan territory while selecting respondents from three main cities of Pakistan including Lahore, Karachi and Faisalabad so the composition of the sample is not analogous enough to represent maximum population of this community.

RECOMMENDATIONS
In today's highly competitive era, brand generation and development are becoming core feature of manufacturing firms (Seetharaman et al., 2001) so future research should be initiated in order to investigate the "loyalty" based behavior of females after using their consciously selected brands.Further, categories based research could be endeavor as large range of beauty care products are readily available in the market now and further segmentation has been done so as research is needed accordingly.
Also, covering a large geographical area for future studies will give a better representative sample size while covering larger females' consumer population.

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: Schematic diagrams for the theoretical framework of female customer's satisfaction with beauty care products

Table 1 :
Cronbach alpha coefficients for total scales

Table 5 :
Demographic representation of monthly spending

Table 7 :
Coefficients a for non-working females and working females Unstandardized coefficients

Table 8 :
Colinearity check for non-working females and working females a : Dependent variable = OS