Investigating Shopping Choice Preferences In Helsinki And Tampere Urban Regions

This paper focuses on researching specialty store shopping choice preferences of consumers in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and Tampere region. The aim of the paper is to analyze the change in specialty store preferences between different parts of a city. Moreover, this paper also studies the differences in preferences between two differently sized urban regions. Understanding the causes of change that can occur in customersí preferences when analyzing different regions of a city will provide us with a better understanding of the consumersí specialty store choice orientation. Also, analyzing and comparing the consumerís choice orientation in two different cities provides valuable addition to the research. The survey was sent to a random sample of households in two major urban regions in Finland. In total 24 000 questionnaires was sent out. First round of the questionnaire was conducted in early June 2009. The survey was sent a second time for the households which did not respond in September 2009. Total number of the respondents were 6 295. Initially a broad exploratory analysis of a sample of the survey respondents answers will be conducted using a variety of statistical methods including Principal Component Analysis and different clustering methods. A variety of geostatistical methods will then be utilized to analyse the spatial aspect of the research. The method that will provide the most significant results will then be used to analyse the full survey.