Consumer attitude and intention to buy OrganicFood as a result of brand extension: An experimental approach

Abstract

Demand of organic product has been growing substantially both domestic and international markets. Moreover, the existence of Indonesia government support through “Go Organic 2010” mission makes organic food as an interesting topic to be discussed recently and become evident to be investigated. Regarding previous studies in organic food area, most of the researchers had investigated about factors driving consumers' behavior toward buying organic food and profiling organic conscious consumer based on demographic factor. Whereas, a research that considering brand extension concept in investigating consumers' attitude and intention to buy organic food has not been discover. Thus, the author aim to fill this gap through answered this research question as follow: “What is consumers' attitude toward organic food in both context of brand extension (unfit and fit association)?” and “Does their attitude correlate with their intention to buy?” Before and after (pre and post-test) type of experimental design was used to test the research hypothesis. The experiment was conducted two times since in the first experiment, there was misperception of subjects in treatment group 2 toward the stimulus so that obscured the independent variable. Besides, we conducted preliminary experiment before the second experiment held. Additionally, exploration study which aim to identified important criteria of milk according to consumers was required before conducted the first experiment. Then, the screening process was conducted to obtain organic conscious consumers that would be participated as subjects in the experiment. After conducting the second experiment, exploration study was required to provide additional explanation for the experiment questionnaires results. There were 33 persons attended in the first experiment whereas in the second experiment, there were 43 persons out of 100 persons invited were participated as subjects. Subjects were randomly assigned into two treatment groups. Control technique required in the experiment was achieved in some ways, such as: matching the subjects and assigned them randomly into two treatment groups, selected the same condition of classroom for each group, and assuming price and availability variable are constant. Stimulus in both treatment groups were given through written media (power point slide and flyer). The data collected from the questionnaire was processed using SPSS 16.0 and it is found that brand extension (unfit and fit association) as the stimulus in the experiment did not influence consumers' attitude toward organic food. Thus, H1a and H1b are not supported. Then, the consumers' attitude correlated with their intention to buy, so that H2a and H2b are supported. Based on the exploration study conducted after the experiment, subjects reported that there were some factors that they are more concerned to, such as: taste of milk, price, benefit of the product, and brand image. Besides, the condition between non-organic parent brand and organic brand extension are not perceived by the subjects in treatment group 1 as unfit association that could influence their attitude since the parent brand and its extension are in the same product category. Nevertheless, the author noticed that attention blocking was occurred in the experiment so that contributes to the unsupported hypothesis.