Abstract
To ensure the sustainable development of mountain livestock farming, the adequate remuneration of high-quality dairy products is fundamental. In this sense, communication strategies aimed at promoting mountain products and ensure better positioning and higher market prices are fundamental. The present research seeks to expand the literature regarding consumers’ willingness to pay for mountain foods by using an online real auction experiment aimed at evaluating the premium price that consumers are willing to pay for summer over winter mountain cheese, depending on the information provided concerning the taste anticipation or animal welfare. The results showed an overall small premium price given to the higher quality summer cheese; this could be, partially, due to a generally low degree of consumer knowledge about mountain dairy farming. With reference to communication strategies, the results provide evidence about the effectiveness of the rational messages founded upon sensorial characteristics and the anticipated taste of cheese. In addition, this study explored that adding a logo had no main effect on the price premium participants were willing to pay. This may be due to the fact that logos and claims, having a lower information content, are more indicated to lead the choice of consumers with a higher level of awareness. In the conclusion section, policy and agribusiness implications of the findings are provided.
Highlights
A seriesnof= χ288); ran, slice of bearing a logo indicating that the cheese was produced using grass-fed milk the non-significance of which allowed us to reject the hypothesis that the groups were; or, (3) a 200 g slice of Summer Mountain Cheese (SMC) without any further information, (No logo: n = 281)
This aim was pursued through an online nonhypothetical auction, for evaluating the price premium that consumers were willing to pay for Summer Mountain Cheese (SMC) over Winter Mountain Cheese (WMC), depending on the information provided
Among the most important results, the difference in willingness to pay for SMC and WMC is qualified by the type of information received, whereas the absence of a significant premium price in the control condition is not surprising
Summary
The Alps are the most densely populated mountainous area of the world, while the populations of coastal touristic mountains and semi-urbanized foothills are growing, most of the internal valleys are suffering a slow but apparently inexorable depopulation which endangers the long-term survival of alpine communities and their economic activities [1,2]. In this sense, alpine livestock farming is showing one of the most alarming shifts. The reasons behind this defection are mainly related to the natural difficulties of mountain agriculture, due to the existence of natural and technological constraints, such as a shorter growing season, the presence of slopes, which impede the use of machinery, and poor mobile network coverage [7,8,9,10,11]
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