Labelling schemes for organic food: Consumer attitudes, preferences and willingness-to-pay in six European countries

Since July 2010, all pre-packed organic food produced in the European Union (EU) must carry the new mandatory EU logo for organic food. Voluntary organic labels (such as national governmental logos and logos of private farmers’ associations and control bodies) can still be used, but only in addition to the mandatory EU logo. This change in the regulatory environment of organic labelling raises a number of questions regarding consumer preferences for different kinds of organic certification logos, which the present dissertation addressed. The first objective was to explore and analyse consumer perceptions, attitudes, preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) regarding different voluntary organic labels. The second objective was to investigate consumer perceptions and attitudes towards a mandatory EU logo. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of consumer research in six European countries was employed including focus group discussions, choice experiments and structured interviews. Based on the empirical results, recommendations are drawn for different actors in the organic sector.

Informed recommender: basing recommendations on consumer product reviews

Recommender systems attempt to predict items in which a user might be interested, given some information about the user's and items' profiles. Most existing recommender systems use content-based or collaborative filtering methods or hybrid methods that combine both techniques (see the sidebar for more details). We created Informed Recommender to address the problem of using consumer opinion about products, expressed online in free-form text, to generate product recommendations. Informed recommender uses prioritized consumer product reviews to make recommendations. Using text-mining techniques, it maps each piece of each review comment automatically into an ontology

Recommender System Based on Consumer Product Reviews

Consumer reviews, opinions and shared experiences in the use of a product is a powerful source of information about consumer preferences that can be used in recommender systems. Despite the importance and value of such information, there is no comprehensive mechanism that formalizes the opinions selection and retrieval process and the utilization of retrieved opinions due to the difficulty of extracting information from text data. In this paper, a new recommender system that is built on consumer product reviews is proposed. A prioritizing mechanism is developed for the system. The proposed approach is illustrated using the case study of a recommender system for digital cameras

Who is the consumer? Who is the reader?

Lecture video slides and also the audio files

Audio of What is the consumer? What is the reader? lecture

Audio of What is the consumer? What is the reader? lecture delivered by Dr Cui Su and Paul Caplan as part of #WSAmacd and #WSAadm remix course

Qualitative research and consumer psychology: alternatives for application

Qualitative research is a research strategy used to analyze the reality. When applied to consumer psychology, it allows a deeper knowledge about consumer’s behavior and associated emotions and motivations. Qualitative research goes beyond the description of buyers’ behavior and shows information about how and why that behavior is produced.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how qualitative research is relevant for the knowledge and the understanding of consumers’ behavior and how, through its techniques, it approaches the consumer’s socio-cultural reality and provides an interpretation of it. The present paper resumes the key aspects of qualitative research, mentioning its related antecedents of its contributions to the marketing and explaining the four most applied techniques in consumer psychology (interviews, focus group, ethnography and observation); moreover, it also studies the way to carry them out and gives some examples of some of the market issues which it can analyze. Finally, we take up again the qualitative data analysis as one of the most relevant topics because it produces important information for the decision making process related to the consumer. In addition, we explain the steps, strategies, types and technological tools to carry it out. 

Consumer Neuroscience as a reserach issue, concepts and applications. A paradigmatic approach

Consumer neuroscience allows a fullest and objective understanding about desires andactions of consumers, turning itself in a fickle tool to the use of the companies and to improve their Marketing strategies. The use of the Neuroscientific methods to the analysis, description and comprehension of human behavior related to consume open a lot of unknown possibilities to discover. Neuromarketing or The consumer Neuroscience as is known too is the study of mental process been part of the consumer behavior and contexts concerning the marketing as well, apply and follow in the environment of the real life of human been. Its supported by the paradigms and the technological development of Neurosciences whose progress has made possible for the seekers to deep in knowledge abouthow the brain work. Physiological operations of mind are a product of a structural and functional ensemble including the brain, as organ, and mind, emotion and cognition, asfunctions. Mind events just can be understood in the middle of the interaction between the organism and his environment. Neuromarketing paradigm it’s still in his infancy and whatfor it’s full of research possibilities. Inside the consumer neuroscience the ethic building doesn’t collapse, the morality isn’t threaten, inside the normal individual Will it’s alwaysWill. The present paper looking for a place to the consumer neuroscience paradigm over the perspective of research open to the Marketing, from the technological advances and hermeneutical vision offer by Neuroscience; it’s propose some of several possibilities ofresearch and practice been explored actually. To give an example its offer one of methods of research as is the Evoked Potentials.

Can consumer complaints reduce product reliability? Should we worry?

We analyze a monopolist’s pricing and product reliability problem when consumers are entitled to product replacement but have heterogeneous cost of exercising this right, and we assess the implications of a decrease in consumers’ claiming cost on reliability, profit, and welfare. We find that reducing consumers’ claiming cost may reduce reliability and increase profit. Additionally, the model can explain why some firms encourage consumers to complain while others discourage consumers from complaining. We also show that welfare and profit are partially aligned, specially when consumers’ claiming cost are relatively low and the firm prefers to promote complaints; consequently, we find that encouraging complaints will eventually increase welfare

Determinants of portuguese wine & enotourism consumer behaviour

This study tries to understand what needs to be done to improve value perceptions and wine usage (1) Change the Portuguese wine and enotourism industry profile to adjust to huge competitive marketplace because it is still production-based; more sales than marketing oriented and the market data are less important then production and sales ones; (2) Enhance strongly the relationship between the wine and enotourism company and final consumers by “management synergies”; high “innovativeness to market”;“marketing research” and by an effective brand strategy. In this line, this paper provides an overview about strategic factors that determine the Portuguese wine and enotourism decision making process. The results of this research enable the essential features of a consumer profile of purchase and consumption to be obtained with respect to: (1) the structure of attributes - intrinsic and extrinsic - that Portuguese still wine consumers best recognise and value in determining its quality, (2) the motivational structures that encourage and guide them in their decision making process when purchasing and consuming wine and enotourism services, (3) the anticipated effect of interaction between different situations of consumption with different price bands.

Training hearing impaired consumer advocates of assistive listening devices

This paper contains a manual for training advocates of assistive listening devices.

A consumer survey designed to identify attitudes, knowledge, acceptance, and use of assistive listening devices in public facilities

This paper presents a consumer survey of hearing-impaired persons used to identify their attitudes, knowledge, acceptance, and use of assistive listening devices in public facilities.