Acceptance of New Food Products: Reference Prices and Psychological Moderators of Heterogeneous Price Effects

This paper emphasizes a consumer-centered perspective to understand new food product success. It pursues two central objectives by showing that consumers are more likely to interpret new product prices as offering gains or losses depending on their individual purchase histories, and consumer psychographics are demonstrated to affect new product adoption directly, and/or moderate effects of prices and promotions as well as quality signalling product attributes. Several hypotheses are generated based on explanations of underlying psychological mechanisms. For data analysis a cross-classified random effects model is applied to household panel data on yoghurt and sausages that includes four crossed random factors. The findings confirm that inclusion of consumer-specific price information is beneficial for understanding new food products’ adoption behavior. Monetary losses as well as gains negatively affect adoption. Purchase habits also hinder adoption while consumer innovativeness is an important driver. Price consciousness and purchase habits moderate price and promotion effects. While price consciousness reinforces negative effects of prices and positive effects of promotions, habits hinder positive effects of promotions. This implies that introductory promotions are an inappropriate strategy for attracting habitual consumers, and managers should identify appropriate target groups in order to improve the efficiency of introductory promotions.