Consumer Unit Types and Expenditures on Food Away from Home

For a long time marketers and other social scientists have been interested in the relationship between household or family type and buyer behavior. At the applied level, companies like the McDonald's Corporation have used family type as a segmentation variable, and a substantial portion of television and print advertising is structured around explicit differentiations. In an effort to predict and explain variations in behavior among different types of families, family life cycle (FLC) theory was developed as an alternative to age and other single-variable segmentation schemes (Lansing and Kish 1957). Since then, various additions, explanations, and applications of FLC have appeared in the literature (e.g., Fodness 1992; Murphy and Staples 1979; Stampfl 1978; Wagner and Hanna 1983; Wells and Gubar 1966). Though not often operationalized in this way, FLC is basically a process theory. Families go through different stages from formation through development and reorganization and eventually disintegration as spouses die. Each stage purportedly is linked to different patterns of purchasing (Derrick and Lehfeld 1980; Wagner and Hanna 1983). When the issue of market segmentation is addressed, it is done in a cross-sectional manner; that is, each family type is considered to be a unique segment and the notion of process is not considered. FLC theory has been criticized for failing to account for differences in socioeconomic and other demographic factors (Pol and Rader 1986; Wagner and Hanna 1983). Specific criticisms regarding the lack of control for income (Ferber 1979) and the exclusion of nontraditional families (Derrick and Lehfeld 1980) also have appeared. Consumer researchers can make good use of the portion of the FLC theory that focuses on differential buyer behaviors across variations in family types. For segmentation and targeting purposes, measuring the differences in what may be considered the propensity to purchase products and services across consumer unit types is of substantial value in evaluating the market potential of a particular segment as well as in developing segmentation and targeting strategies.(1) This paper focuses on the use of consumer unit types to segment the food-away-from-home market. Initially, eight consumer unit segments are identified and comparisons in per capita purchasing are made. Income and race/ethnicity are used as composition variables; that is, factors that are considered to be important in food-away-from-home expenditures, and, therefore, hypothesized to modify the initially observed relationship between food-away-from-home expenditures and consumer unit types. A major objective of this study is to show how an analytic method referred to as log-linear purging can be used to control for the effects of income and race/ethnicity on expenditure patterns across different types of consumer units. The results of log-linear purging analysis reveal the composition-controlled propensity to purchase food away from home for each consumer unit segment. Propensities are presented in percentage terms which provide consumer researchers with simple and straightforward information that can be subsequently used in making strategic decisions. STUDY CONTEXT The restaurant industry is undergoing significant change in the United States. Although 1994 sales are projected to be $275 billion (4.3 percent of GDP), the industry is experiencing difficulties (Carlino 1994). Seemingly, shifting cultural preferences regarding the value placed upon time spent at home along with economic restructuring have brought about a stagnation in expenditures on food away from home. While the average amount of money spent by households on food was basically constant from 1989 to 1991 ($4,300), the amount spent on food away from home dropped nearly $150 to $1,600 over the three-year period (U.S. Department of Labor 1993). As a result, all food expenditures classified as away from home decreased from 42. …