Causality of Product Awareness Coconut Flour Towards Future Engagement, Indonesian Market

Sekolah Tinggi Manajemen Ipmi, DKI Jakarta 12750, Indonesia 12345


INTRODUCTION
Flour is a powdery substance which is created through a milling process. It is usually made by grinding grains such as rice, oats, corn, wheat, maize, rye, barley, etc. As one of the main ingredients in making bread, cake, cookies, etc., lour is one the most common and sought-after ingredients in the world. In 2015, the global market of lour was valued at US$200,297 million. By the year 2020, it is expected to grow into $270,895 million with a forecast of 4.4% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) throughout the period. In 2022 it is predicted that awareness about gluten-free products is the most impacting factor to the global lour market (Satsangi, 2016). People around the world are starting to demand for healthier products (Nielsen, 2016).
In Indonesia, lour is one of the most popular primary needs that can be seen in everyday life. From home industry, factory, and other things, lour gives bene its to the user by giving a good texture, aroma, looks, taste, and so on for the users to enjoy. For home industry in Indonesia, lour could be used for almost all purposes in cooking depending on the lour type. It can be used for frying, baking, grilling, steaming, as a media to thicken sauces and many other creative ideas in terms of using lour in cooking. However, there are also disadvantages in using and consuming lour. Flour typically has a high carbohydrate contribution as an ingredient in cooking. Since carbohydrates will be converted into sugar when digested in the human body, it might cause diabetes, heart attack, and other diseases when lour is consumed excessively. Wheat lour that contains gluten is one of the most dominating products in Indonesian lour market; it covers more than half of the market. Indonesia itself is not excluded from the global countries that are shifting to healthier products and lifestyles. According to a Global Marketing Intelligence Firm named Mintel (2017), majority of Indonesian urbanites, which resided in Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Yogyakarta and Semarang are eating healthier and exercising more. 75% of Indonesians living in the urban areas aim and demand to have a healthier diet while 58% wanted to exercise in order to maintain their itness level. Approximately 41% of urban Indonesians decided to avoid re ined sugar and consume more fruits and vegetables related products.
Coconut lour is one of the gluten free lour that is present and still not well known in Indonesia. It is made by processing dried coconut lesh until it was shredded to different levels of smoothness to be called as coconut lour. Dried coconut lesh could be obtained by irstly processing the coconut lesh to coconut milk and the leftovers of it would be baked at a low temperature in order for the lesh to dry and easily crushed into lour. When used as an ingredient for cooking or baking, coconut lour gives a strong aroma and coconut lavor to food and baked goods. Like any other gluten-free lour, it is also an alternative to wheat lour or other gluten lours. Coconut lour have several bene its for health such as helping consumer to control their weigh, reducing total cholesterol in the blood, preventing constipation, and maintain digestive system in order to be healthier. With those bene its, as one of the top producer of coconut, Indonesia has been exporting the product outside Indonesia while in Indonesia itself people rarely experience the bene it from the coconut lour.
In this study, we investigate the role of product awareness towards the future engagement of the product; conceptually on the relationship between product, awareness, consumer decision making, and future engagement. Our study focuses on 25 years old and above health conscious people in Jakarta which will represent Indonesia with socio economic status of class A & B. This study employs SmartPLS to examine the effects of individual variables on outcome variables. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Review of the literature on product, awareness, consumer decision making, and future engagement. After that will be discussed methods and discussions of the results as well as conclusion and recommendation.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES Product and Awareness
Product can further be dissected into three levels. As the level of product goes up, more values are added into it. This is not only to better satisfy the market but also to differentiate one product from another as it de ines the product's segment, target and position and proposed a reason on why to buy this particular product. These three levels are the core product, the actual product and the augmented product (Kotler and Armstrong, 2012).
In the world of marketing, awareness is the power and force of the brand's presence in the consumer's mind (Aaker, 1996). Awareness could be measured by how customers or consumers keep in mind about brand and how they recall the brand from a certain category of products. Awareness has been suggested to be measured through perception (Eriksen, 1960;Holender, 1986). Perception is a conscious state of mind that can affect awareness. For example, one check that some branded products are expensive (perceived) then one will be aware of the expensive prices of branded products. Awareness will determine the customer choice in choosing the product or services from the whole market.

H1:
The existence of product (coconut lour) does not necessarily affect awareness.

Decision Making and Future Engagement
The product awareness of coconut lour affects the decision making of consumer to purchase the coconut lour. In addition to this, for the long term, the engagement of Indonesian consumer towards coconut lour may also be affected. Van Doorn et al. (2010) de ine customer engagement as a customer's behavioral manifestations that have a brand or a irm focus, beyond purchase, resulting from motivational drivers.
Bowden (2009) de ines customer engagement as "a psychological process that models the underlying mechanisms by which customer loyalty forms for new customers of a service brand as well as the mechanisms by which loyalty may be maintained for repeat purchase customers of a service brand." In order for the coconut lour purchase to be continuous and sustainable in the future, consumers must be engaged to the product itself and for that to happen, trust and loyalty must be present. However, trust and loyalty will not be present if there is little to no effort of product awareness in the irst place and careful planning on engaging consumers.
The customer engagement concept explained that when the products and services are introduced, it will create marketing activities to create an awareness which helps to identify the customers' needs for the product and services. Once customer makes purchase. It will create an experience for the customers. When customer has a positive experience with the products. They would be satis ied with the irm and it will create repeat purchase.

H3:
The decision made by customer to purchase healthy product (coconut lour) affects the engagement of the product in the future.
Based on the hypotheses above, we are able to build and form a conceptual framework of this study. Figure 1 below shows the conceptual framework of this study.

Measurement Development
There are four main indicators that could be seen from the research framework, they are Product, Awareness, Consumer Decision Making and Future Engagement. Product will depend on core product, actual product, and the augmented product based on the three levels of products mentioned in the literature review while awareness will depend on the knowledge and the perception of the consumers towards the product itself since knowledge and perception are the indicators whether a consumer is aware or not aware of the product, in this case is the coconut lour. In terms of consumer decision making, it is dependent on consumers' culture, social, personal and psychological which are consumer purchase behaviors that will then lead the consumers to ind, try or buy the product. Data were collected to health-conscious people age 25 and above who live in Jakarta. The total 150 samples were collected using the non-probabilistic method with the convenience sampling. Data analysis was carried out by using Smart PLS.

Reliability and Validity Test
This survey will undergo a pilot test to 20 respondents that matches the criteria given. this pilot test is needed as to know whether the survey questionnaires are easily understood, clearly articulated (not biased) and engaged the same perception for each question given so that respondents can give the correct responds that will be very much useful for the study. The data will then be check for its reliability and validity presented by the Cronbach's alpha. The acceptable value of alpha is ranging from 0.70 to 0.95, which means that the items are correlated to each other . Table 1 shows the result of the reliability and validity test of this study.
Knowing that the Cronbach's Alpha for each variable are above 0.7, the researchers could continue to give the questionnaires to the rest of the respondents (130 target respondents) since the questions that represent each variable are both reliable and valid.

H1:
The existence of product does not necessarily affect awareness.
The regression of product, which is denoted as X, and awareness, which is denoted as Y, is shown to be 0.550. This means that there is a relatively strong negative relationship between the latent variable product and awareness which makes the hypothesis true. So therefore, the existence of product does not necessarily affect awareness. There must be additional effort or inputs in order for product (coconut lour) to affect the awareness of the product in Indonesia.
H2: Low product awareness in luence the consumer decision making to purchase a product.
The regression of awareness, which is now denoted as X, and consumer decision making, which is denoted as Y, is 0.372. This shows that the relationship between awareness and consumer decision making is not signi icant or relatively weak which means that the hypothesis is false. It also further concludes that when the market knows a certain product (coconut lour), even to the most in-depth knowledge and great perception, it does mean that the market will purchase the product. There might be other factors that are in luencing the market in terms of decision making to purchase this certain product (coconut lour). These other factors might be from indicators such as cultural, social, personal and psychological factors of the customers which made customers to purchase a product that is suitable to their needs and preferences. For example: personal expectations are not reached, or the surroundings of the customers do not support the decision to purchase the product.

H3:
The decision made by customer to purchase healthy product affects the engagement of the product in the future.
The regression of consumer decision making, which In the end, the future engagement of this particular product towards the market will depend on the decision made by the consumers on whether to purchase or not to purchase the product, which is no other than the coconut lour. Future Engagement has also two factors which are feedbacks and referrals from the consumers of the coconut lour. The relationship between the variables in the research framework will be tested.

Sample and Data Collection
International Journal of Business Studies Vol. 2 No. 1 ( February 2018) is denoted as X, and future engagement, which is denoted as Y, is shown to be 0.661. This means that there is a relatively strong positive relationship between consumer decision making and future engagement thus, making the hypothesis true. Therefore, when customers felt that they are it or suitable with a certain product, speci ically coconut lour, they will purchase the product and has a tendency to re-purchase more in the future. They might regularly purchase to consume, spread a positive word-of mouth or referral to their surroundings, or even share their thoughts and promote the products through their social media. This will certainly affect the engagement of the product (coconut lour) towards the market in the future.
To conclude, there is a relationship between product awareness and future engagement in which shown from the regression results of product to awareness and consumer decision making to future engagement with relatively strong relationship (regression value of product awareness: 0.550; consumer decision making future engagement: 0.661). However, there are other decision-making factors that might affect the customers' decision to purchase in which shown from the relatively weak relationship between awareness and consumer decision making, which is shown with a regression value of 0.372. Table 2 shows the path coef icient of the variables.

DISCUSSIONS
Based on the indings of this study, it is understood that the existence of the product itself, no matter how bene icial it is, does not necessarily affect the awareness of the market (H1 accepted). So, in order for the product to be known in the market, there must be an effort needed to be done. However, on the consumer decision making side, awareness does not play a big role in pushing the consumers to make a purchase of the product (H2 rejected). There might be other variables that play a bigger role comparing to awareness in terms of in luencing consumers to buy a certain product, here is coconut lour. Lastly, there is a relationship between consumer decision making and the engagement of 0 Awareness CDM FE Product consumer in the future (H3 accepted). So, with this information, important to be reminded that for the sustainability and continuality of purchase and consumers-to-consumers interactions, there should be a decision to make the irst purchase as the kick start of the product to consumer relationship to form and bloom.

CONCLUSION, LIMITATION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
With this study, it is hoped that there is more understanding in terms of the present awareness of coconut lour in the Indonesian market and how to better approach the market to purchase the product, which is none other than the coconut lour itself.
To conclude, there is an overall relationship between product awareness and future engagement which can be seen from the relatively strong relationship between product and awareness (negatively) and consumer decision making and future engagement (positively). However, there are other decision-making factors that might affect the consumers' decision to purchase a certain product since it is shown that awareness has a relatively weak relationship towards the decision making of consumers. That is why, there is a need of future research in order to identify the right variable that has a relatively strong relationship towards the consumer decision making variable. Also, future research can also expand the research into other big cities in Indonesia since this research is only conducted in the capital city of Indonesia as a representative.