Margot Dyen, Lucie Sirieix, Sandrine Costa, Laurence Depezay and Eloïse Castagna
This paper aims to explore consumers’ experienced life and studies how practices interconnect and are organized on a daily basis. The objective is to contribute to a better…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore consumers’ experienced life and studies how practices interconnect and are organized on a daily basis. The objective is to contribute to a better understanding of how (or whether) it is possible to interfere with daily practices, as public policies pretend to do, to address several societal challenges (food waste, healthy eating, greenhouse gas reduction, social equity, etc.).
Design/methodology/approach
Using the concepts of routine, ritual and practice to understand the dynamics of daily life from a practice theories perspective, this study is based on a qualitative methodology combining a projective method of collage coupled with semi-structured interviews with 23 participants and, participant observation of shopping, cooking and mealtimes at home with 11 of the 23 participants.
Findings
Results show that the degree of systematization of practices defines different types of routine according to various systematization factors (time, commitment, social relations, material), suggesting a distinction between systematized, hybrid and partially systematized routines. Beyond the question of the degree of systematization of practices composing routines, results show that some practices are embedded in daily routines due to their ritualization.
Research limitations/implications
This work takes part of the debates on how to study households’ daily life, and challenges the understanding of daily life activity more globally than just by the prism of isolated actions. For that, this study uses the concepts of routines and rituals. They are relevant to describe and to capture the tangle of practices composing food activities. The study shows that the material dimensions, the pressure of time, the commitments and the social relations condition the global arrangement of the food practices in a variable way.
Practical implications
Such results offer new perspectives for intervening on households’ daily consumption by understanding the global dynamics of food routines.
Originality/value
This work contributes to a better understanding of consumers’ food practices and routines and to a practice-change perspective considering constrained and routinely constructed lives.
Details
Keywords
Eli Cohen, Francois d’Hauteville and Lucie Sirieix
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the difficulties raised by the question of cultural differences in consumption behaviour studies, and proposes the best‐worst method as a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the difficulties raised by the question of cultural differences in consumption behaviour studies, and proposes the best‐worst method as a tool for comparing data from a cross‐national survey.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from samples of wine consumers from Australia (n = 283), the UK (n = 304) and France (n = 147), using the BW procedure, where respondents have to assess what are the most and the least important attributes when choosing a wine at a restaurant.
Findings
Results show differences between the countries, with a clear contrast between the French, on the one hand, and the Australians and British, on the other. They confirm empirically the idea that the country may be a valid “culti unit” in cross‐cultural research.
Research limitations/implications
The authors suggest that the method works well in the context of this research, but does not avoid some of the uncontrollable biases of declarative data, nor the question of the relevance of some choice items in cultural contexts that can be very diverse (such as the role of a waiter in a restaurant).
Practical implications
The paper shows that the method can be used quite easily in a large number of studies where it is important to hierarchize choice cues and compare different segments of a population.
Originality/value
This fairly large scale study contributes to the marketing literature dealing with country of origin as a segmentation criteria, and exploring the concept and measurement of “cultural difference”. Finally, it fosters a scarce literature dealing with consumer behaviour in “on premise” situations.
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Nina Langen and Lucie Adenaeuer
An important characteristic of Fair Trade products is that a fair price is paid to the producer. At the same time the Fair Trade system is accused of being inefficient with…
Abstract
Purpose
An important characteristic of Fair Trade products is that a fair price is paid to the producer. At the same time the Fair Trade system is accused of being inefficient with respect to the distribution of the price premium paid by consumers along the supply chain. This study aims to focus in particular on consumers' perceptions of fair pricing. Besides, the paper seeks to assess the extent to which consumers' expectations are somehow anchored in or in accordance with reality in Germany in 2007.
Design/methodology/approach
To get insights into German consumers' perception of Fair Trade a consumer survey based on face-to-face interviews with n=484 participants was conducted in 2008. To approach the profit distribution along the Fair Trade coffee chain a web-based market investigation was performed.
Findings
One important result is that most of the consumers actually narrow Fair Trade down to the issue of paying fair prices to farmers. The comparison of the efficiency of the Fair Trade system that is requested by the study participants (measured as the share of an additional euro paid for a Fair Trade product) and the point of sale calculations (revealing the percentage of the retail price going to the producer) indicates that for 60 percent of the respondents a calculated share of 50 percent reaching the producer would not be high enough. Results reveal that 10 percent of the respondents require a minimum share of 90 percent of the retail price to reach the producer. A total of 23 percent are satisfied with 80 percent; 60 percent of the respondents want that more than 50 percent of an additional euro spent reaches the producer. Only 4 percent of the participants are willing to accept an efficiency of less than 20 percent.
Originality/value
This is the first paper not only investigating how much of the price premium paid by consumers reaches the Fair Trade producers but also delivering insights regarding how much of the price premium paid in the retail store for Fair Trade coffee consumers do request to reach the Fair Trade producer.