Abstract
Increasing saturation, maturity and globalisation in the agricultural goods market is forcing suppliers to innovate in order to sustain their business performance. One of the options open to them is to gain a deeper understanding of existing and potential customers in order to develop marketing strategies tailored to meet their priorities. This paper contributes to this option by identifying the food choice process for regular and occasional consumers of organic products. Consumer behaviour is modelling using the means-end chain method, which, as well as consumers’ interest in product attributes also considers their knowledge of themselves and their personal involvement in the organic food choice process. The results show that the purchase choice between both consumer groups. For regular consumers the two main components in the final purchase choice are health and self-image. Therefore market positioning should pay attention to these personal consumer priorities in addtition to the product differentiating features. Break down the cognitive barriers that continue to hamper the development of this market.
Highlights
Throughout the developed world, and across a wide variety of product categories, consumption patterns and marketing management practices have evolved in recent years as a result of changes in consumer tastes and preferences
The third part of the questionnaire was an application of a technique designed to elicit subjects’ means-end chains and the fourth and final section was geared to capturing their background characteristics
The detection of possible differences would enable the development of marketing strategies tailored to sustain or boost consumption of this type of food product
Summary
Throughout the developed world, and across a wide variety of product categories, consumption patterns and marketing management practices have evolved in recent years as a result of changes in consumer tastes and preferences. As a final point in this characterisation of the two groups, we might mention that organic food stores, health food stores, herbalists and marketplaces featured as the main places of purchase among the high consumption segment. These findings regarding the attitudinal and behavioural differences between the two consumer segments are consistent with those obtained for a variety of national and international markets. We are able to conclude that the two groups differ clearly in terms of the importance they attach to the food-health link, and to the guarantee of health safety offered by organic products. The less frequent consumers of these products attach more importance to the price aspect, as supported by other studies, where it is shown that as their organic food consumption increases, consumers become increasingly more willing to pay the required premium (Vindigni et al, 2002; Zanoli and Naspetti, 2002; Project CONDOR, Thøgersen, 2005)
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