Abstract:
The purpose of this research was to study Nakhon Si Thammarat shrimp farmers' ranking of marketing factors that affected their decision-making when buying shrimp feed in market places. Questionaires were sent to all shrimp farmers Nakhon Si Thammarat who had registered with the Thai Department of Fisheries before December 2008. The statistical methods used to analyse the farmers' responses were frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. T-test and Ftest were used to analyse the deviation of these values.
Overall, the research results found that "Product" and "Price" marketing factors' were ranked as "very important". Place of sale and promotion were ranked as "moderately important". Farmers with different ages and different length of time to grow crops each assigned different level of importance to Product. By studying the Price , researcher found farm owner characeristics: sex, level of education ranked the importance of Price differently. By studying the Place, researcher found that farm owners with the characteristics: sex, age, experience growing shrimp, and growing time per crop arranged the imporatncce of Place differently. By studying the Promotion, researcher found that owners with different education level arranged Promotion differently. Testing results of the farm characteristiscs found that farm factors: size of farm, number of crops per year, and growing-time per crops gave different significance to Promotion. Based on the numbers of times the farmer changed water in the pond, the farmers rated Price, Product and Place differently. Statistical significance showed 0.05 for all these statistical analyses.
WALAILAK UNIVERSITY. CENTER FOR LIBRARY RESOURCES AND EDUCATIONAL MEDIA