Information on regular products offered at most grocery stores are often insufficient and hard to
read/understand. Today’s groceries-buying consumers may have allergies, be vegan,
environmentally interested, and because of that be in need of more profound information about
the products they are about to buy. The purpose of this project is to provide them with that
information. With the consumer awareness application at hand, we hope to give the consumer the
additional information needed - to make it easier to be aware!
There is no doubt that such an application might be useful. But is there a need for it out there? Is
the general population aware of the need of more consumer awareness? Anthony Bailey of the
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University of Toledo wrote a paper (Bailey, 2005) on consumer’s awareness and use of product
review websites. These websites exist solely to inform consumers about products, both facts and
opinions. One can safely say that taking the information stored on websites and make it more
available to users through a mobile application is a step forward.
The paper also mentions that consumers who are aware of product review websites are very likely
to use them, though many use them only for reassurance after they purchased a product. A mobile
application will possibly shift these statistics more toward checking before purchase, due to the
possibility to check a product right then and there when it’s in front of you. The existence of this
option will aid in reducing the effort of being aware, help consumers be more cost efficient by
buying exactly what they want and not things they later will find out is not what they were
looking for