Factor Affecting the Decision and Consumer’s Attitude Towards Prefabricated Steel Box Structure

Abstract

           Prefabricated Building Construction, is one of the options to substitute traditional ways of construction because it can control construction duration, cost, and quality significantly. Together with the advanced construction technologies nowadays, the Box System has been adapted with those prefabricated steel structures to create advantages due to its speed of construction and installation, being able to closely investigate quality in a controlled environments and can help to reduce the amount of labor in construction site. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study about factors affecting the decisions to choose and consumer’s attitude towards both advantages and disadvantages of prefabricated steel box structure. The data is collected by using questionnaire on 400 samples who are the attendees of ActForum’19 hosted on November 14^th to 17^th, 2019 at Impact Arena Muang Thong Thani; the data is then analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics.

            The results of this research have shown that 1) most of the samples still have no plan to use prefabricated steel box structure; there is only 33% of samples who have set planned to use prefabricated steel box structure within the next 1 to 12 months, who mostly are male aged between 26-35 years-old, do their own business, have salary around 50,000-75,000 on average, have the purpose to use the prefabricated steel box structure for housing, set the budget around 250,000-500,000 THB, and plan to use within next 12months, 2) most of the target group have their attitude toward the advantages of prefabricated construction with box system highest on its shorter construction duration compared to traditional construction, while their attitude toward the disadvantages is highest on its additional costs of transportation and limitations when the construction type would enter the construction site, and 3) most of the target group choses ‘product’ as the most important marketing mix of this construction type, which has the mean high up to 4.47 and correlates with the attitude towards this construction type’s advantage within the first three ranks.

            From the results, it points out the type of consumer who tends to buy and who have no plan to use this type of construction, which correlates with demographic patterns, customer journey, advantages and disadvantages of the prefabricated construction with box system, as well as marketing mix. Meanwhile, this result can also be beneficial to the entrepreneurs to adapt with their future strategy to suit customer’s needs more.