Cultural influences on motives for organic food consumption

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test whether differences in motives for healthy food consumption stem from differences in cultural dimensions and whether cultural dimensions could serve as predictors for health food consumption motivations.Design/methodology/approachThe study correlated secondary data on motives for healthy food consumption in a number of West European countries to cultural dimensions of those countries. In addition, primary data for prime motives of healthy food consumption were collected for Croatian consumers.FindingsInfluence of cultural dimensions was partly confirmed and that only for individualism and assertiveness, while human orientation and uncertainty avoidance showed no correlation to organic food consumption motivation. Croatian consumers display homogeneous collective awareness, i.e. they almost exclusively consider health as prime consumption motive.Research limitations/implicationsCorrelation analysis was conducted on a small data set; the units of analysis were not distributed along the whole range of independent variables (cultural dimensions), coding of motives might be too robust. Future research should better tackle the exposed problems and also aim at discovering alternative antecedents that could improve prediction of prevailing motives.Practical implicationsBy definition cultural dimensions capture variations in consumers' motives. Because of exposed limitations, the study did not provide full evidence for the conceptual proposal (that healthy food motivation is determined by cultural dimensions). Nevertheless, the conceptual model could serve managers as an initial indicator in predicting motives for healthy food consumption.Originality/valueThis research proposes a relationship between cultural dimensions and consumer motivation, which is an under researched field.