Farmer Consumer Partnerships

Summary

Globalisation and growing anonymity of trade with organic products causes farmers in Europe to see themselves forced to lower their production standards in order to stand up to world-wide competition. Furthermore consumers criticise food products which were produced under unsatisfactory social and environmental conditions. Thus, this project investigates marketing and communication strategies by which organic farmers try to include higher ethical values in their production than the legal ones. The aim is to know which communication arguments for ethical aspects have proved to be the most promising from the consumers’ point of view in different countries.
In the first part of this project promising communication strategies and arguments of farmers’ organisations will be identified. Selected arguments will be tested in different regions by a so-called Information Display Matrix (IDM). With this tool the best ranked alternative product attributes and sales arguments will be detected. Advertising companies will then develop product labels and leaflets with information using the best-ranked arguments per country. Afterwards, different proposals for labels and leaflets will be tested in a two step approach with consumers by using Focus Group Discussions and a sales experiment in a so-called Consumer Choice Test. The experiment will be used to analyse consumers’ buying behaviour and willingness to pay by presenting real products in a close to realistic laboratory setting.
The results will provide a valuable tool for the strategic positioning of organic companies and farmers’ initiatives to differentiate their products from the mass market of organic products and improve their products’ image and the consumers’ willingness to pay. Policy makers will gain a better understanding of the country-specific ethical attitudes and behaviour of consumers.
Project partners are:
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hamm, University of Kassel, DE
Dr. Matthias Stolze, Research Institute of Organic Farming (FibL), CH
Dr. Susanne Padel, University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA), UK
Prof. Dr. Bernd Freyer, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (BOKU), AT
Prof. Dr. Raffaele Zanoli, Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM), IT
Dr. Roberta Callieris, Medditerrean Agronomic Institute of Bari (IAMB), IT