Abstract
The present study focuses on “Made in Italy” food products and it investigates the barriers affecting the consumption of Italian products sold by speciality retailers on the German market. To reach this goal, we referred to existing literature which identifies the factors that limit the use of public quality of origin standards, related to socio-demographic factors, consumer ethnocentrism, and product knowledge. Data is collected by means of a survey questionnaire administered face-to-face to a sample of 203 consumers. Data is analysed by means of descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and regression models. Results indicate that ethnocentrism tendencies may prevent consumers to shop at speciality retailers and that building consumer knowledge about products may increase the purchase of authentic Italian food products, especially among the consumers that are less ethnocentric, helping to support the market position of “Made in Italy” products.
Highlights
Nowadays, markets offer more and more products coming from different countries because of the strong development of global trade
We evaluate how ethnocentrism and product knowledge are affected by the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents and if the effect is different among Eataly and non-Eataly customers
As a first analysis of the data, we report some descriptive statistic useful to provide insights on our first research question, i.e., on the level of consumer ethnocentrism tendencies and product knowledge
Summary
Markets offer more and more products coming from different countries because of the strong development of global trade. Consumer-related literature has mostly explored the drivers and barriers affecting consumer preferences towards traditional and typical products in order to evaluate the effectiveness of existing quality policies [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] To this date, only few studies have explored the effectiveness of firm level strategies for such products from a consumer perspective. Only few studies have explored the effectiveness of firm level strategies for such products from a consumer perspective To fill this gap, the present research aims at identifying the factors affecting the preferences of international food consumers towards Italian food products, taking into consideration two sets of consumers: Those who shop at speciality retails, in this case Eataly, and those who shop at generalist retail stores. We evaluate if ethnocentrism, product knowledge and socio-demographics have an effect on the purchase of authentic Italian products
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