Abstract

Family businesses are an important economic driver of the countries, especially Chinese family businesses in Thailand. These family businesses are the key form of enterprise, particularly souvenir sector realizing 22.4 billion Baht of Thai market value with 35,000 entrepreneurs. Thus, for surviving, product innovation in Chinese family businesses have received a lot of attention in the studies since the last decades but there are still some interesting points. Then, this paper tries to answer the research question; what product innovation factors are influenced by customers. 400 of small family Chinese businesses customers were collected data using questionnaires in Chiangmai province. The results show that most customers are females with more than 40 years and 31-35 years of age. T-test confirms that product innovation factors are influenced by socioeconomic factors of customers. Moreover, Socioeconomic or demographic factors of customers; age and occupation shows significantly related to product innovation in three categories; line extensions, Me-too products and competitor’s products and new-to-the-world products. Keywords: Product innovation, Chinese family business, Chinese moon cake, factors, Chiangmai

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