Direct and mediated impacts of product and process characteristics on consumers’ choice of organic vs. conventional chicken (D.6.9)

Summary

There is alack of research into why consumers value process characteristics. In this study, we test the hypothesis that the impact of process characteristics such as organic and free-range on consumers’ choices of food products is at least partly mediated through expected eating quality or taste expectations. In other words, the process characteristics partly function as cues to (eating)quality. Using atraditional metric conjoin tapproach based on an additive model, four product characteristics (productionmethod, price, size and information about farmer and rearing conditions)were varied in afractional factorial con-joint design, creating nine profilesof whole chickens. 384 Respondents rated the nine different chickens in terms of taste expectations and willingness to buy. Since the nine records for each respondent are not indepen dent, we used linear mixed modelling for the mediation analysis. We findthat, as expected, taste expectati ons are astrong predictor of willing ness to buy. As hypothesised, the impact of both product and proce ss characteristics on willingness to buy is at least partly mediated through taste expectations. Hence, the study shows that process characteristics are important for consumers, not only in and off themselv es, but partly because consumers make inferences about eating quality from knowledge about such process characteristics.