Organic Farming in Germany / Organic Farming in Switzerland

The two papers give a brief overview of the current (2006) organic farming sitation in Germany and in Switzerland. The papers include information about the history of organic farming, the market situation and statistics

Marketing Approaches to Pop Up Stores: An Exploration of Social Networking

Internet and mobile technologies are redefining how retailers promote themselves to consumers. For instance, over recent years, the high street has witnessed the phenomenon of ‘pop up stores’, which rely on social network sites (SNS) and text messaging to inform consumers of their presence. In essence, they are retail stores that open up at empty retail locations for a temporary period of time and then disappear. The purpose of this paper is to describe this trend in terms of which retailers are doing it, why, where and how are they doing it? In addition, the paper is theoretically underpinned by an examination of literature drawn from entrepreneurial marketing in order to explore how retailers have exploited internet and mobile technologies in order to create marketing and branding opportunities. Finally, the paper offers directions for future research

Village shops: outdated or revived model? Relevance for local supply, social functions and economic viability

An increasing number of villages in many countries do not have any local supplier at all. In the retail sector of Germany, the large supermarket companies require at least 5,000 inhabitants in the catchment area to run a shop. The aim of this paper is to describe the contribution of village shops to local supply and social life as well as to assess their economic viability. Therefore, findings from a telephone survey of approximately 100 shop operators in Germany are presented. The results show the limited supply and social function of the shops as well as their precarious economic situation. Many shops only offer a small range of goods so that the coverage of basic needs is difficult and they are mostly visited for supplementary purchases. Most village shops provide a snack area as a meeting place, but these are relatively seldom used. The findings indicate that permanent public and civic support is required to sustain many small shops in small villages. Because of the market conditions, however, public initiatives cannot halt the trend towards increasing numbers of ‘food deserts’; at best they can slow down the process. Where village shops cannot be sustained economically, home delivery services, mobile supermarkets or improved mobility services are feasible options for assuring local supply for less mobile people

Grocery Shopping Channels: Segmentation by Gender and Age Group

Grocery shopping via online and multi-channel (using both physical stores and online) has been increasing. Although physical stores still serve a dominant format for grocery shopping, the research examining consumption patterns across grocery channels fails to show this wave of increasing online or multi-channel grocery shopping. Using a secondary data set of 7212 grocery shoppers, we used corresponding analysis to identify grocery shopper segments based on gender and age group that were associated with specific channels (physical store, online, and multi-channel), and GLM to examine consumption patterns across the segments. We offer both theoretical and practical implications for grocery marketers

Agri-food importing firms amid a global health crisis

This paper exploits daily customs transaction data on the universe of Swiss agri-food importing firms to assess the response of firms to a global shock. Estimating a linear model that regresses product-level import margins on daily COVID19 shocks and a host of fixed effects, we find that the pandemic had a substantial trade-reducing effect on imports. The trade effects were driven mainly by a reduction in the number of importing firms (i.e., 63% of the total effect), and much less by the number of products imported and the average import value per product per firm. We explore several sources of heterogeneity and show, among others, that larger and incumbent firms were affected more by the trade adjustments. Our results also reveal that the relative contribution of each import margin to the decline in aggregate imports depends on the level of data aggregation (i.e., daily, weekly or monthly). Finally, we validate and confirm our main findings by testing two mechanisms: (i) third-country supply-side effects using insights from structural gravity models and (ii) changes to consumer demand using consumer mobility, and retailer and consumer scanner data

Farmer Consumer Partnerships: Information search and decision making - the case of ethical values of organic products

The CORE Organic pilot project ‘Farmer Consumer Partnerships’ aims at analysing and testing innovative communication strategies of organic companies with respect to ethical values as a means of reconnecting organic farmers and consumers against the varying cultural and behavioural backgrounds of consumers in five European countries (AT, CH, DE, IT UK). The previous work packages (WP1 and WP2) provided a selection of the most promising communication arguments with respect to ethical values of organic food based on literature review and on the farmers’ or farmers’ initiatives point of view. Based on this, the task is to narrow down the wide range of existing arguments related to ethical values in organic food production. Therefore, the arguments were categorised in a pragmatic way, taking into consideration the likely beneficiaries of these ethical activities and the expert rating of research partners. The final selection included the three major categories of economic, social and environmental concerns and, additionally, animal welfare as well as cultural issues. Finally, 14 ethical arguments belonging to the following sub-dimensions were chosen: biodiversity, animal welfare, regional production, fairness in relation to the farmer, care farming, social aspects of production, and the preservation of cultural features. The aim of this work package was to confront consumers with these ethical concerns and to identify the most promising communication attributes for further analyses within the next work packages. It was to be determined which ethical information is most interesting for consumers in the partner countries with respect to the purchase decision on organic food. Chapter 2 concentrates on the theoretical perspective of information search within consumer behaviour. Factors influencing extensiveness and content of information search are presented. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the description of the methodological approach of the research within this research step. For the analyses within this research, it was decided to use the Information Display Matrix (IDM). The IDM is a process tracing method aiming at monitoring the cognitive processes underlying information search, judgement and choice. The IDM was used to analyse the depth of information search regarding ethical values of organic food and to identify those ethical attributes most relevant for decision making. The two-dimensional matrix lists alternative product stimuli in columns, while product attributes are listed in rows. Each cell contains concealed information about a product-related attribute, which has to be accessed one after another by the subject in order to obtain the information (Jacoby et al. 1987, Mühlbacher and Kirchler 2003). The ethical attributes were tested with the product organic milk. The IDM was accompanied by a questionnaire aiming at the validation of the results obtained by the IDM, at an explanation of the information acquisition behaviour and at giving answers on the ‘real life’ information behaviour concerning organic food. 240 organic milk buyers were interviewed face-to-face, in a computer assisted manner in the five study countries. Subject of chapter 4 is the description of the sample regarding socio-demographic indicators of participants and ‘real life’ information and purchasing behaviour. Concerning the sources of information on organic food, the results show that ‘articles in newspapers etc.’ are preferred, followed by ‘conversation with family and friends’ and ‘product packaging’. ‘Information by sales personnel’ was frequently mentioned in Italy but rarely in Switzerland and in the UK. ‘Reports on radio or TV’ seem to be less important in Italy than in all other countries. When asked for the kind of information they had actively been looking for within the last two months, ‘product origin’ was mentioned most often, followed by information on ‘ingredients’. In Switzerland and Germany, on the other hand, information on ‘organic certification’ and ‘production and processing methods’ was ranked higher than information on ‘ingredients’. In Italy, information on ‘product quality’ was more frequently asked for than on ‘ingredients’ whereas in the UK, information on ‘food miles’ is more important. Information on ‘prices’ seems to be much more important in Austria than in all the other countries. Chapter 5 concentrates on the depth and content of information search for ethical values of organic food obtained by means of the IDM. On average, respondents spent 4:28 minutes for information search and opened 34 information fields within the IDM. There are marked differences between the countries. Besides socio-demographic factors like age and the level of education, attitudes regarding organic food consumption could be identified to have an impact on the amount of information looked for preceding the product choice. The importance of different attributes for the choice of the organic product was analysed via the share that each attribute has in all firstly accessed attributes and via the frequency of accession of each attribute. According to these indicators, the most important attributes are ‘animal welfare’, ‘regional production’ and ‘fair prices for farmers‘. These attributes were followed by ‘product price’, indicating that consumers tend to prefer cheaper products over ethical products with attributes like ‘care farming’, ‘social criteria of production’, ‘protection of biodiversity’ and ‘cultural aspects’. There are only minor differences between the countries in the order of the most important attributes. Only in Italy ‘product price’ seems to be more important than ‘fair prices’ and ‘animal welfare’. Factors impacting on the preferred ethical concern are age, gender, level of education and motives for organic consumption. Expected relationships between attitudes towards organic consumption and the preferred ethical concern proved to be weak. The choice decision shows that the cheaper organic product without any additional ethical values was preferred by 6% of the respondents only. While in Germany 3% decided in favour of the cheaper product, 9% of the Austrian respondents chose the cheaper one. This result allows the conclusion that a large share of consumers of organic food would be willing to pay a price premium for ethical products. The report is completed by some concluding remarks (Chapter 6) pointing at the appropriateness of the IDM for the task fulfilled but also its methodological limitations. The central result of the analyses of work package 3 for the whole project is the identification of the most important ethical values from the consumers’ point of view. However, there are still some open research questions, particularly as for the joint effect of different variables on the respondents’ information behaviour. The corresponding analyses will take place during the next months and will be published in scientific journals

Why espresso? : Explaining changes in European coffee preferences from a production of culture perspective

Since the 1990s supposedly ‘historic’ fault lines separating coffee preferences and practices across the European continent have been broken down. The consumption of Italian-style espresso-based beverages outside the home is now widespread. Much of this is drunk in branded coffee-shop outlets, based on a format popularised in the United States. This article investigates these changes employing the culture of production perspective. It is structured in three parts. The first investigates the formation of quasi-national coffee-drinking styles in the at-home and away-from-home sectors with particular reference to Italy; the second analyses the transformation of out-of-home coffee-drinking in the UK during the 1990s; and the third examines the spread of Italian-style coffee across the European continentPeer reviewe

New perspectives on 20th-century European retailing

Retailers are often regarded as ‘intermediaries’, whereas in fact they are actors in their own right. They influence, and are influenced by, their local and national ‘ecosystems’, together with other national retailing ‘ecosystems’ with which they interact. The history of this process in 20th-century Europe has been incompletely explored, while the English-language litera- ture remains dominated by the ‘Americanisation’ model, whereby innovations pioneered in the United States gradually diffused to the more ‘backward’ countries of Europe, a process mediated by barriers to competition that varied in extent and severity between different European nations. In this essay, we re-evaluate this model in the light of the special issue authors’ contributions and other recent studies, including the new specialised journal History of Retailing and Consumption. The United States is often shown to have been a major source of knowledge transfer to Europe, but the information flows were more complex than many advocates of the Americanisation model acknowledge. For instance, while most marketing scholars see the sources of the ‘modernisation’ of European retailing in American department stores, chains and supermarkets, recent research has shown that such an innovation as self-service began in several small independent American grocery stores during the 1910s and ‘spread in small retail outlets, sometimes well before the advent of the large retail spaces which are tradi- tionally viewed as the origin of the self-service economy’. 1 Moreover, American-inspired formats were not always appropriate welfare-maximising models for European countries (and, arguably, in some cases, such as regional shopping malls, even for the United States)

How German Online Retailers Price Foods: An Empirical Analysis for Chocolate Products

Despite the increasing importance of online grocery retailing, little is known about price dispersion across online providers, the relation between online and offline prices as well as the frequency of price adjustments. We employ means of descriptive and inductive statistics as well as panel econometrics to address these issues for German online food retailers. Daily online prices for twelve chocolate products charged by eight pure online and multichannel retailers and collected over three months are investigated. Information economics suggests that a maturing online market will call forth more price homogeneity online due to lower search costs by consumers as well as more flexible prices due to lower costs of price adjustments by retailers. Our results suggest, however, that neither homogenous prices nor frequent price adjustments do occur on the German online chocolate market