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Article
Publication date: 4 July 2016

Vasco Boatto, Luca Rossetto, Paolo Bordignon, Rosa Arboretti and Luigi Salmaso

The purpose of this paper is to detect market segments where consumers have a different knowledge of domestic and imported Parmesan cheese in USA and Canada. The results may be…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to detect market segments where consumers have a different knowledge of domestic and imported Parmesan cheese in USA and Canada. The results may be helpful in understanding to what extend North America consumers appreciate Parmesan cheese and brands, Parmesan consumption and price while recognizing market segments according to consumer awareness, involvement and covariate effects.

Design/methodology/approach

A class of mixture models, known as combination uniform binomial (CUB), is applied to survey data collected in USA and Canada. A questionnaire, filled out by 540 restaurant customers, collects opinions about consumption, purchase features and price. The CUB model estimates the two latent variables, known as feeling and uncertainty, explaining the respondent’s behavior as awareness and involvement variability while the CUB clustering procedure detects market segments.

Findings

CUB results show that the Parmesan is a well-known cheese but also that a small share of consumers look for the place of origin. The model detects market segments where consumers express better awareness on taste, price and origin while the knowledge of imported Parmesan brands is lacking. Most of consumers, not paying attention to the origin, would hardly switch to the imported Parmesan because of higher price or because they are already satisfied of the domestic cheese.

Research limitations/implications

The results suffer some restrictions in the sample representativeness. A further analysis, where the survey is done at retail and advances in CUB models, may improve the market segmentation procedure allowing a better generalization of results.

Practical implications

The survey results highlights the appreciation and consumption of Parmesan cheese, especially for its taste, as well as a low perception of Italian brands. Consequently, trade companies should focussed their communication strategy on activities encouraging North American consumers to taste Italian Parmesan brands (e.g. tasting sessions, price promotions) instead of costly and less effective advertising campaigns.

Social implications

Parmesan brand misunderstandings are often associated with market information asymmetry. The paper results show a market segmentation where purchases are mainly driven by Parmesan taste regardless of domestic or imported brands. Likely, the consumption of domestic Parmesan is well consolidated and it is not a consequence of brand information asymmetry.

Originality/value

The CUB model is an innovative and flexible no parametric approach for evaluating consumer behavior and for segmenting the market while dealing with complex problems of food knowledge.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 118 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

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Article
Publication date: 7 March 2016

Rosa Arboretti and Paolo Bordignon

Packaging features have been shown to be of great importance for the consumer final choice of fresh products (Silayoi and Speece, 2007). Packaging is an extrinsic attribute, which…

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Abstract

Purpose

Packaging features have been shown to be of great importance for the consumer final choice of fresh products (Silayoi and Speece, 2007). Packaging is an extrinsic attribute, which consumers tend to rely on, when relevant intrinsic attributes of the product are not available. In the current literature, studies on the influences of packaging features on consumer preferences are mainly related to classical preference evaluation methods like conjoint analysis (CA). The purpose of this paper is to apply both CA and the less known combination of uniform discrete and shifted binomial distributions (CUB) models to food packaging evaluations.

Design/methodology/approach

Starting from a real case study in this field, along with CA, the author apply CUB models (Iannario and Piccolo, 2010) as a useful tool to evaluate preferences. CUB models can grasp some psychological characteristics of consumers related to the “feeling” toward packaging attributes and related to an inherently “uncertainty” that affects the consumers’ choices. Both psychological characteristics “feeling” and “uncertainty” can be linked to relevant subject’s information. At first we detect preferred packaging attributes of fresh food by means of CA, then we apply CUB models to some relevant attributes from the CA study.

Findings

Results show that attributes like packaging material and size/shape of packaging are the most important attributes and that biodegradable packaging, reclosable trays/bags and long “best by” date are also valuable features for consumers. The introduction of covariates showed that specific demographic characteristics are linked to both feeling and uncertainty.

Originality/value

The “data driven” segmentation results give to the integrated approach “CUB models and Conjoint Analysis” the most important added value.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 118 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

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