Pavol Kral

Given the changing market conditions due to the globalization of the economy, legal environment, competitiveness, and consumer base, brand management must apply innovative approaches that reflect these changes. This paper aims to analyze the relations between selected socio-demographic characteristics of consumers and their preferences toward brands (i.e. the reasons they would replace their preferred brand with another one). The survey targeted 2025 consumers from the eight regions of Slovakia in March 2019. The respondents’ age had to be at least 15. Thirty-four questions formed the survey questionnaire, which was separated into three sections. Three socio-demographic factors were selected for analysis: age (three categories), education (three categories), and social status (six categories). The correspondence analysis was carried out via IBM SPSS Statistics, Version 25. The results were plotted on a multidimensional map. The average age is 40.24; the largest frequency is associated with primary/vocational graduates, 51.11%; 50.67 % of employees are recognized as having the greatest frequencies for social status. The findings indicate that the higher the age of consumers, the lower the effect of the image; the higher the level of education, the lower the effect of price on consumers’ motivation to replace their preferred brand with the alternative one. Furthermore, social status is mostly contingent upon the age. Hence, this paper observed similar correspondence analysis results between these socio-demographic characteristics; the most specific groups are students and the unemployed.

Acknowledgment
This study was financially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency – Grant No. APVV-15-0505: Integrated model of management support for building and managing the brand value in the specific conditions of the Slovak Republic.