An empirical application of consumers' pub consumption choices

When choosing a pub to visit, consumers are rarely loyal to one pub, and will often have several “favourite pubs”, often moving between multiple pubs within a number of hours. Additionally, the choices between pubs are complex, based not only on location, but also on other factors, such as distance, service, atmosphere, and the variety of both food and drink items available (Wells et al, 2019 and Grayson and McNeill, 2009). However, over the last decades, the number of pubs is declining in many countries. Hence, it is more important than ever to understand the reasons why people visit specific pubs and not others and the characteristics they seek in the pubs they visit.  This research aims to gather evidence that helps us understand their choices. Moreover, by doing this research in different countries, we aim at unraveling possible existing differences between communities. In this research we will determine for different countries how consumers rank several so-called “pubchoice characteristics”. We will do this by means of an experimental Q-sort approach (Watts and Stenner, 2012) to determine the relative importance of each of these variables focusing specifically on pub choice behaviour. The data collection will exist out of three parts: first a pre-experiment survey on socio-demographics and “pub visiting habits”; second the actual Q-sort experiment and third a post-experiment survey.