Abstract:
The major purpose of this study was to determine the influence of patronage motive on the consumption of soft drinks by students in Colleges of Education in Enugu State. Five research questions were answered and five hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The population for the study consisted of 2286 made up of 479 male and 1807 female students from Enugu State College of Education (Technical) and Federal College of Education Eha-Amufu. A sample size of the study was 457 respondents and was drawn using 20% to divide the population. This was made up of 100 male students and 357 female students. Survey research design was used to generate data for the study. This instrument was face validated by three experts from Department of Vocational Teacher Education University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The questionnaire was pilot tested with a sample of 30 students drawn randomly in Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education Owerri, Imo State. Cronbach Alpha reliability test was used to determine the internal consistency of the instrument and this yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.74. Data were analyzed using mean statistics for the research questions and t-test was used to test the null hypotheses. Based on the findings, it was concluded that, price determination affects inflation rate. It was recommended that soft drink manufacturing companies should utilize product price reduction strategy whenever new products are to be introduced in the market in order to encourage patronage.
