S7E7: How can business savvy help Maine farmers succeed?

Like opening any business, starting and operating a farm can be challenging without any in-depth entrepreneurial knowledge or skills. To help strengthen support for farmers’ business skills, University of Maine faculty members Erin Percival Carter and Stephanie Welcomer established the Business, Agriculture, and Rural Development (BARD) technical assistance training program in the Maine Business School. The BARD program trains UMaine students to serve as consultants for farmers and operators of other small-scale and sustainable agricultural businesses. These students can assist agribusinesses with various aspects of commerce, such as data-management, price-setting, marketing, financial and strategic forecasting, market segmentation, product development, market intelligence and consumer research. The BARD program recently received a $292,000 award from the Small Business Administration that was requested by U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King through the FY22 Congressionally Directed Spending process, known as earmarks. In this episode of “The Maine Question,” Carter, an assistant professor of marketing, discusses how business savvy can help farms succeed

Designing and Distinguishing Meaningful Artisan Food Experiences

We examine consumer expectations about how specialty versus conventional food products affect well-being and how small, artisan producers can use that information to design better customer experiences. Drawing on recent work examining the costs and benefits of pleasure- and meaning-based consumption, we investigate whether consumer expectations that specialty products are more meaningful lead to increased desire for additional product information. We selectively sampled from the target market of interest: high-involvement consumers who regularly consume a food (cheese) in both more typical and specialty forms. The authors manipulate product type (typical versus special) within participant and measure differences in expected pleasure and meaning as well as a variety of behaviors related to and preference for additional product information. We find that these high-involvement consumers expect special food products to provide both more meaningful (hypothesized) and more pleasurable consumption experiences (not hypothesized) than typical food products. Consistent with our theory, consumer use of, search for, and preference for additional product information was greater for special products. A causal mediation analysis revealed that expectations of meaning mediate the relationship between product type and utility of product information, an effect which persists controlling for the unexpected difference in expected pleasure

A Dynamic and Multi-Dimensional Approach to Consumer Well-Being

Consumer researchers are increasingly concerned with the well-being of consumers. In recent years, we have embraced well-being as an independent topic of study, an important implication of marketing practices, and a pursuit predictive of judgment and behavior. Yet, the variety of ways in which we measure and define well-being are increasing and sometimes contradictory and lead to contradictory results. In my dissertation, I propose that consumer well-being is best studied as a multi-dimensional dynamic process. In the first essay, I use this dynamic conceptualization to examine how well-being changes over the lifespan. This question has received a great deal of attention in psychology, economics, sociology, and philosophy but prior work has produced equivocal results. I contribute to this important debate by testing a new method of measuring and studying well-being, one that measures multiple dimensions of well-being at once and allows each to vary independently. By separately measuring multiple contributors to well-being and examining both individual and aggregate patterns across the lifespan, I find clues as to why previous work has resulted in conflicting findings and I find I am able to explain more variance in judgments of overall well-being than alternative methods of study. In my second essay, I demonstrate how a dynamic conceptualization of well-being can help researchers to better understand the costs and benefits associated with marketplace phenomena, specifically, hyped events. In 6 studies over 22 hyped events, I find that hype causes people to deviate from otherwise preferred activities and that this deviation is largely detrimental to consumer well-being. I found a single positive influence of hype: it sometimes improves social well-being. Hyped events helped solitary viewers feel connected to others via a shared cultural experience. Building on this insight, two studies conducted before, during, and after Super Bowls 50 and 51 revealed that focusing on the social elements of hyped events increased benefits to well-being compared to focusing on the details of the events. This essay demonstrates the limited benefits and extensive costs to believing the hype, particularly when it causes you to deviate from activities more in line with your values, goals, and preferences

Being funny is not enough: the influence of perceived humor and negative emotional reactions on brand attitudes

Humor is a common goal of marketing communications, yet humorous advertisements do not always improve consumer attitudes towards the advertised brand. By investigating a potential downside of attempting to be humorous, our inquiry helps explain why humorous ads can fail to improve and potentially even hurt, brand attitudes. We show that advertisements intended to be humorous also risk causing negative emotions independent of humor appreciation. We investigate the link between humor appreciation, negative emotional reactions and brand attitudes using four samples of advertisements. We find that attitudes towards an advertised brand depend less on the degree to which the ad seems funny and more on the degree to which the ad triggers negative emotional reactions. Consequently, whether an advertisement helps or hurts brand attitudes depends on whether the ad decreases or increases consumers' negative feelings independent of perceived humor.18 month embargo; published online: 12 Jun 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]