Brand Management

Consumer Buying Behavior and Brand Choice in Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) Segment: A Literature Review

Article Details

Pub. Date	:	Mar, 2022
Product Name	:	The IUP Journal of Brand Management
Product Type	:	Article
Product Code	:	IJBRM030322
Author Name	:	Kapil Malhotra* and Kavita**
Availability	:	YES
Subject/Domain	:	Marketing
Download Format	:	PDF Format
No. of Pages	:	13

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Abstract

India is no longer a small car market, but Indians are in love with Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs). SUVs have been rapidly expanding in the global automobile industry due to their ruggedness and aggressive designs with dynamic consumer perceptions. In the past few years, the Indian automobile industry has grown enormously, contributing 7.1% to the country's GDP and 49% to the manufacturing GDP. This paper explores how SUVs are perceived in developing nations in the context of economic and social diversity in order to extract existing knowledge and also understand consumers' buying behavior and brand choice in the SUV segment in automobile industry. The current study, through a literature review, finds that a majority of the studies focused on consumers' purchase decision in the automobile industry as a whole. In the present study, consumer buying decision is associated with rational brand choice in the SUV segment. Additional reviews of literature on the automobile industry, including two-wheelers, three-wheelers, Multi Utility Vehicles (MUVs), sedans, and hatchbacks, are carried out. Finally, the foremost barriers and challenges faced by SUV car owners are identified and presented.

Introduction

The automotive industry is one of the most significant sectors in India (Prasad and Augustin, 2014) It contributes 7.1% to India's GDP and 49% to manufacturing GDP, and is also one of the biggest job-providers of the country (Rao, 2017; and Saranga et al., 2018). The government has decided to reduce the economy's excessive reliance on the services sector in the future and create employment opportunities based on manufacturing activities (Goswami and Daultani, 2021). The Indian automotive sector is the fifth-largest (after China, United States, Japan and German) in the world (Kumar et al., 2020). At the economic transition stage, India could be seen as the 3rd largest automotive industry in the world (Meena et al., 2021). Before independence, the Indian auto market was seen as a market for imported vehicles, besides assembling cars produced by General Motors (GM) and other brands, servicing, financing, dealership, and maintenance of vehicles. Three decades after independence of the country, the total production of passenger cars was limited to 40,000 units per annum, manufactured by three major players: Hindustan