Helping You to Waste Less? Consumer Acceptance of Food Marketing Offers Targeted to Food-Related Lifestyle Segments of Consumers

ABSTRACT

Consumer households and consumer behavior have been identified as the major cause of food waste in the supply chain. Food marketing might offer products and services that help consumers to reduce their food waste or reduce the consumer-related food waste at the consumer–retailer interface. However, such strategies require consumer acceptance and targeting the right customers. Through an online survey of 800 Danish consumers and a measure of food-related lifestyle, four clusters of consumer segments are identified. The segments are compared with regard to their acceptance of a number of actions consumers can take to reduce food waste or their acceptance of food marketing services they would need to pay for. Acceptance differs with food involvement and the role of the price criterion, as well as with gender, education and age. The findings show how food marketing can help consumers to reduce food waste, through actions targeted to specific segments of consumers characterized by food-related lifestyle differences.     

Using discrete choice experiments to estimate willingness-to-pay intervals

Willingness-to-pay has always been conceptualized as a point estimate, frequently as the price that makes the consumer indifferent between buying and not buying the product. In contrast, this article estimates willingness-to-pay (WTP) as an interval based on discrete choice experiments and a scale-adjusted latent-class model. The middle value of this interval corresponds to the traditional WTP point estimate and depends on the deterministic utility; the range of the interval depends on price sensitivity and the utility??s error variance (scale). With this conceptualization of WTP, we propose a new measure, the attractiveness index, which serves to identify attractive consumers by combining knowledge about their price sensitivities and error variances. An empirical study demonstrates that the attractiveness index identifies the most attractive consumers, who do not necessarily have the largest WTP point estimates. Furthermore, consumers with comparable preferences can differ in their purchase probability by an average of 16%, as reflected in differences in their WTP intervals, which yields implications for more customized target marketing.     

Green intentions under the blue flag: Exploring differences in EU consumers’ willingness to pay more for environmentally‐friendly products

Recent research on consumer social responsibility highlights the need to examine psychological drivers of environmentally‐friendly consumption choices in a global context. This article investigates consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) more for environmentally‐friendly products across 28 European Union (EU) countries, using a sample of 21,514 consumers. A multigroup structural equation modeling analysis reveals significantly different patterns and relationships, in how (a) subjective knowledge about the product's environmental impact, (b) environmental product attitudes, and (c) the perceived importance of the products’ environmental impact influence consumers’ WTP more for environmentally‐friendly products across countries. The hypothesized model predicts WTP for 20 out of 28 countries and the findings show that a “one‐size‐fits‐all” approach is inadequate in capturing the heterogeneity of EU consumers. Hosfstede's cultural dimensions of uncertainty tolerance and individualism explain differences in WTP for environmentally‐friendly products across EU countries. Business, marketing communications, and policy making implications are discussed.     

From quantity to quality: understanding slow fashion consumers for sustainability and consumer education

There is a growing interest in slow fashion, a production method which emphasizes quality as a way of achieving sustainability in the fashion industry. In order to develop a sophisticated and targeted marketing strategy, this study aimed to identify potential slow fashion consumer segments and understand their characteristics. The final 221 completed responses from a sample of nationwide U.S. consumers were analyzed by cluster analysis. Based on consumer orientation to slow fashion, four consumer groups were identified: Highly‐involved in slow fashion group, Conventional group, Exclusivity oriented group and Low‐involved in slow fashion group. The characteristics of each group were profiled according to personal values, apparel consumption behaviours and demographics. With distinctive profiles of each group, different marketing strategies were suggested to address the needs of each group effectively. This study extends academic understanding of slow fashion in consumer perspectives, and provides important perspectives for consumer education on apparel consumption.     

Value-based pricing in competitive situations with the help of multi-product price response maps

This article introduces multi-product price response maps for various value pricing applications in competitive situations. The maps are based on the direct elicitation of individual willingness to pay (WTP) as a range for competing products; they reveal an individual's or market's choice probability for a focal product, at its own and competing products' prices. Transforming the price response into profit, revenue, or unit sold maps supports optimal pricing decisions. The maps are also useful for optimizing profit differences from the closest competitor and for portfolio pricing. Managers can use a consumer indecisiveness map, gained from the WTP range data, to devise complementary marketing measures at prices where consumer uncertainty is high. The illustration of this approach uses two empirical examples, featuring two or more competing consumer goods, and demonstrates the predictive and external validity of these proposed maps.     

Effects of au naturel packaging colors on willingness to pay for healthy food

This study introduces and defines a novel color family—au naturel colors—and proposes that featuring these hues on product packaging enhances consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for healthy food products, but not for unhealthy food products. This effect occurs irrespective of the fit between the colors of the product and of the packaging, and of the color lightness or saturation. Perceptions of product authenticity mediate the relationship between au naturel colors packaging and consumer WTP for the product. The results of seven studies provide support for the proposed conceptual framework, contributing to the literature on consumer responses to colors and packaging features, and allowing to draw implications for the marketing of healthy food products.     

Employing a Dichotomous Choice Model to Assess Willingness to Pay (WTP) for Organically Produced Products

Abstract

This study employs a dichotomous choice model to identify the socio-economic characteristics and attitudes that influence consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) a premium for organically produced products (OPP). Considering consumers' growing interest in quality and safety of food, the study attempts to identify consumers level of awareness on OPP, the intention to buy OPP and the WTP a higher price for OPP. Results highlight consumers awareness and intention, revealing useful information for the development of OPP market. The estimated maximum WTP indicates that consumers are willing to pay a substantial extra price to purchase OPP. Finally, WTP seems to be affected by certain consumer attitudes and socio-economic factors.     

A Conjoint Analysis of Quality Wine

Abstract

Weighted least squares approach for conjoint analysis is used to examine buyer preferences towards wines produced in different Spanish regions. Two producer regions are considered, Na-varra and Aragon, and three wine attributes: price, origin and grape vintage year (wine age). In both regions, differences between urban and rural consumers' preferences are tested. Results indicate that the origin of the grapes is the most important attribute for the wine consumer. Rural consumers prefer locally produced wines while Rioja wines are better considered by urban consumers. The price and the age of the wines are secondary attributes in consumer preferences. Finally, some market segments are formed based on individual consumer preferences and some of their sociodemographic characteristics in order to address differentiated marketing strategies to these segments.     

The new WTP: Willingness to participate

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's ‘willingness to pay’ a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement—with or without the company's approval—in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.     

Social media marketing: Who is watching the watchers?

The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This study analyzes a census-balanced sample of online adults (n = 751) to identify consumers’ perceptions of using social media data for marketing purposes. The research finds that consumers’ perceived risks and benefits of using social media have a relationship with their comfort with marketers using their publicly available social media data. The research extends the applicability of communication privacy management theory to social media and introduces marketing comfort—a new construct of high importance for future marketing research. Marketing comfort refers to an individual's comfort with the use of information posted publicly on social media for targeted advertising, customer relations, and opinion mining. In the context of the construct development, we find that targeted advertising is the strongest contributing component to marketing comfort, relative to the other two dimensions: opinion mining and customer relations. By understanding what drives consumer comfort with this emerging marketing practice, the research proposes strategies for marketers that can support and mitigate consumers’ concerns so that consumers can maintain trust in marketers’ digital practices.     

The impact of cultural symbols and spokesperson identity on attitudes and intentions

In today's multicultural societies, ethnic targeting is an increasingly important marketing strategy. Two main approaches to target ethnic minorities have emerged in recent years: messaging consumers when their ethnic identity is most salient, and doing so with spokespeople or models with the same heritage as the targeted minority. In this paper, we conduct conceptual replications of two influential articles representative of these research streams: Forehand and Deshpandé (2001) and Deshpandé and Stayman (1994). Our studies show that the effects of such practices on minority consumers are not homogeneous. The findings identify generational status (first vs. second generation) as an important boundary condition for these ethnic targeting strategies. This has important conceptual and practical implications for choosing an effective ethnic targeting strategy.     

Consumer aliteracy

A large and growing segment of global society is comprised of capable but unwilling readers. Despite the proliferation of aliteracy and extant research on illiterate consumers, the topic of consumer aliteracy is unexplored. To address the issue, an eight‐item unidimensional measure of the construct is developed and validated. This consumer aliteracy scale captures reading attitudes and behaviors across a variety of written marketing materials. Results indicate that consumer aliteracy is predictive of how consumers approach written versus visual marketing information and the amount of time devoted to these information formats in a choice setting. Understanding the phenomenon of consumer aliteracy is essential for researchers studying consumer responses to a wide variety of written marketing materials. In addition, consideration of consumer aliteracy may help research that employs written marketing messages as stimuli to better detect other processing effects.     

Ethical Decision-Making by Consumers: The Roles of Product Harm and Consumer Vulnerability

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of perceptions of product harm and consumer vulnerability on ethical evaluations of target marketing strategies. We first established whether subjects are able to accurately judge the harmfulness of a product through labeling alone, and whether they could differentiate consumers who were more or less vulnerable. The results suggest that without the presence of a prime, subjects who depended on implicit memory or guess were able to detect differences in “sin” and “non-sin” products and consumer vulnerability, but were far less likely to be able to distinguish among high and low levels of product harm and consumer vulnerability. The inability to accurately identify high and low levels of product harm and consumer vulnerability impacted their perceptions of the ethicality of target marketing strategies, such that only four out of 18 target marketing strategies were judged as unethical. Thus, our findings contradict previous research that found subjects judged many more of the integrated strategies as unethical [Smith and Cooper-Martin, J Market 61(1997) 1]. Our results suggest that assessing ethical evaluations of strategies varying in product harm, and consumer vulnerability may only be relevant if consumers can accurately identify product harm.     

Noticing Cultural Differences: Ad Meanings Created by Target and Non-Target Markets

Abstract

Target marketing is an increasingly crucial component of marketing strategy, particularly given the expanding cultural diversity of the nation's population. Prior research suggests marketers need to consider the nontarget market (consumers who perceive themselves not to be the target of an advertisement) as well as the target market. Further, researchers have called for a more meaning-based approach to understanding advertising and consumer behavior. The authors therefore explore the meanings created by target and nontarget viewers of advertising targeting black, white, and gay / lesbian cultures. Their results show that asymmetries in cultural expertise, power, distinctiveness, and stigmatization among those cultural groups influence the meanings created by target and nontarget viewers of ads targeting those groups.     

Investigating the Types of Value and Cost of Green Brands: Proposition of a Conceptual Framework

This conceptual article applies the customer value (CV) concept in the context of green marketing aiming to provide insights on the factors that motivate and/or hinder the development of consumer–green brand relationships. The article draws upon existing literature on the streams of CV, relationship marketing and environmental behaviour and synthesises relevant findings to propose an integrated conceptual framework entailing all identified types of value and cost, psychographic characteristics, as well as dimensions of relationship quality (RQ) and loyalty. Furthermore, it addresses existing questions on the links among constructs and proposes several relationships that may lead to a better understanding of consumer behaviour towards green brands. Through the here-proposed conceptual model, the article initiates the process of empirically examining the consumer adoption of and relationship development with green brands. The CV framework adopted here may provide practitioners with knowledge on the value and sacrifice factors, as well as the dimensions of RQ that are the most important in targeting green consumers and designing relationship marketing strategies. The article also fulfils an identified gap in the literature, as it is the first that brings together and applies research findings from CV and relationship marketing fields in the green marketing context and proposes an integrated approach to understanding consumer–green brands relationships.     

Genuine brands or high quality counterfeits: An investigation of luxury consumption in China

This study examines the effects of different marketing and manufacturing factors on the perceived quality gap and willingness to pay (WTP) for genuine luxury brands. Using the survey data of 786 Chinese consumers, the results show that three marketing factors (product innovation, price promotion, and sales environment) and two manufacturing factors (production in country of brand origin and difficulty in producing the products) all indirectly influence WTP through a perceived quality gap between originals and counterfeits. These effects differ significantly among consumers with different counterfeit and genuine brand purchasing experiences. For consumers with counterfeit purchasing experience, it is important to emphasize the manufacturing factors in the marketing strategies; however, for consumers who only buy genuine brands, marketing factors play a more important role. Copyright © 2016 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond explicit measures in marketing research: Methods,theoretical models,and applications

Whereas traditional self-report procedures and methods mainly tap into consumers explicit attitudes, the implicit cognition paradigm provide researchers and marketing practitioners with a unique tool to uncover consumer implicit attitudes, choices, decisions, and action tendencies. By means of the sheer extent and validated models and empirical studies in cognitive psychology, the application of implicit measures and techniques in marketing and consumer studies is in its infancy; thus, this special issue focuses on theories, tools and approaches for examining consumers unconscious attitude and sustainable consumption patterns. The objective of this special issue is to illustrate theoretical and methodological application of implicit consumer cognition paradigm in marketing and consumer studies. This special issue of Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services highlights the implicit cognition approach as a greater alternative in measuring consumer attitude and tendencies where scientist and marketers are impotent to capture.     

The effect of product touch information and sale proneness on consumers' responses to price discounts

Since price discounts are costly and can negatively affect consumers' perceptions of quality, it is crucial to identify the factors that make them effective in stimulating purchase behavior. Drawing on cue utilization theory, we examine price discount effectiveness in affecting consumers' reliance on the sale cue based on the provided product touch information as an intrinsic cue and individual consumer differences in sale proneness. Two experimental studies indicate that price discount information, product touch information, and sale proneness interact to determine consumers' responses. Perceived quality is the underlying mechanism behind the observed effects. For nonsale-prone consumers, product touch information favorably influences responses to large price discounts by addressing product quality concerns and enhancing purchase confidence, but has no effect for regularly priced or low discounted products. For sale-prone consumers, product touch information is not effective in increasing their responses regardless of the discount size. A qualitative study provides support for these results and highlights the role of perceived quality and purchase confidence. The research contributes to behavioral pricing, cue utilization theory, and sensory marketing and suggests that marketing managers should provide consumers with product touch information when implementing high discounts for products for which prepurchase touch is important.     

Short brand stories on packaging: An examination of consumer responses

The persuasiveness of stories and their influence on consumers have been acknowledged in marketing, particularly within the advertising field. In marketing practice, brand stories are increasingly also appearing on product packages. However, packages differ from ads in significant ways as communication channels; for example, the space for messages on a package is limited by the size of the package. This study reports findings from two experiments comparing consumer responses to fast‐moving consumer good (FMCG) packages with and without short brand stories. The findings show that even a short brand story included on FMCG packaging has a positive impact on consumers’ affective, attitudinal, product value, and behavioral intention responses to the brand.     

Environmental and Economic Dimensions of Sustainability and Price Effects on Consumer Responses

The lack of attention to sustainability, as a concept with multiple dimensions, has presented a developmental gap in green marketing literature, sustainability, and marketing literature for decades. Based on the established premise of customer–corporate (C–C) identification, in which consumers respond favorably to companies with corporate social responsibility initiatives that they identify with, we propose that consumers would respond similarly to companies with sustainability initiatives. We postulate that consumers care about protecting and preserving favorable economic environments (an economic dimension of sustainability) as much as they care about natural environments. Thus, we investigate how two sustainability dimensions (i.e., environmental and economic) and price can influence consumer responses. Using an experimental method, we demonstrate that consumers favor sustainability in both dimensions by giving positive evaluations of the company and purchase intent. In addition, consumers respond more negatively to poor company sustainability than to high company sustainability. In comparison, consumers respond more negatively to the company’s poor commitment to caring for the environment than to the company’s poor commitment to economic sustainability. We also find that consumers do not respond favorably to low prices when they have information about the firm’s poor environmental sustainability. Finally, we find support for an interaction effect between consumer support for sustainability and corporate sustainability; that is, consumers evaluate a company more favorably if the company shares the consumers’ social causes. Overall, we conclude, from our empirical study, support for the idea that consumers do respond to multiple dimensions of sustainability.