Is the old communist brand preferred by the young consumers? A country of origin study case with multimethod analysis

The market of durable goods from Romania is characterized by numerous particularities In the case of buyers, the most often used and the most influential promoting tools are the ads presented on TV. The Romanian producers being represented on this market by the Arctic brand (old communist Romanian brand). This research studies the preferences of the Romanian young consumers concerning brands of durable goods which are promoted by means of advertising videos complementary using – two non-parametric tests (for the first time for marketing data), respective Friedman test (very often applied in medicine and machine learning) and Kolmogorov – Smirnov test.The results shows that young consumer prefer an old communist brand like Arctic and there are no social–demographic differences between the preferences of the Arctic brand. We consider the results of this research as being important because, in the current global durable goods market, the primary role of advertising is to help build brands (Copley, 2004, p 110). Producers and distributors have to adapt their offer to the particularities of the Romanian market. One of the statistics tools, the Friedman test was used for the first time in testing the TV advertising preferences, as it is more often applied in medical domain and learning machine.