Consumer Perception of Government Regulations in the Marketing of Consumer Products in Nigeria

Abstract

The Nigeria society is littered with consumer product regulatory policies and agencies, however the degree of relevance and efficiency of these agencies is a-judged low compared to expectations. This situation is traced to the poor level of cooperation that exists between these agencies and target beneficiaries of the policies. This work thus studied consumer product marketing environment with selected regulatory agencies, producers of consumer products and consumers as targets and sources of data of the purpose of ascertaining the perception of consumers of government regulations. Data were analyzed based on Likert ranking scale built on the use of the nominal, ordinal and interval scales as well as the Spearman’s rank correlation co-efficiency and analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistics. Identified as problems are paucity in the presentation of the stimuli of regulatory messages, poor choice of media, inability to optimize the attributes (characteristics) of target markets in message building, poor management of regulatory agencies personnel among others. Given these, the paper recommends efficiency in media choice and management, consumer market research for the optimization of the attributes of the target market in message planning and development, the creation of balance in message building based on the urban-rural imbalance of target market structure, efficiency in regulatory agencies’ personnel management and socialization effort in agencies’ personnel among others.