Cristina Marreiros

Consumer behaviour towards organic food in Portugal

This paper reports the results of an analysis of Portuguese consumer behaviour towards organic food products (OFP). For this purpose, a literature review on quality and food safety of OFP was carried out and a consumer survey was implemented, with data collected by means of personal interviews in the capital city of the country. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and a comparison of gender and age groups was made using chi-square tests and analysis of variance. Factor analysis was used for the attitudinal scales in order to reduce the number of variables and to search for dimensions underlying these attitudes. The results show positive consumer attitudes towards OFP. However, its consumption is much lower than could be expected from these attitudes. Intentions to buy OFP are quite high, suggesting that these products might obtain a substantial market share in the future. This is an encouraging sign for potential OFP producers, who might compensate for the costs of moving from traditional to organic farming with an increase in market share.

Shopper Centric Category Management in Convenience Stores: a Qualitative Study

The literature shows that category management is an important concept and tool for retailers and suppliers, but that there is a trend to move to a more shopper-centric category management approach, linked to the shoppermarketing approach. However, the knowledge on this issue is scarce on some retailing sectors, like convenience stores. The present study is focused on convenience stores, with the main purpose of finding out to what extent non-major food retailers successfully adopt a shopper-centric category management. The study is relevant in order to evaluate if a more shopper-centric approach is adequate to smaller companies/stores. To accomplish that goal, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted among convenience store retailers and suppliers. Six semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with Commercial Directors and Trade Marketing Managers. This data was complemented with thirteen interviews with shopper marketing experts. The data was analyzed using thematic content analysis technique, identifying themes, categories, subcategories, units of meaning and relations. The results revealed that convenience store retailers use some of the principles and techniques of the shopper-marketing and shopper-centric category management approaches, which they do in a non-standardized and non-formal approach or process. Their suppliers (the manufacturers) do it in a more formal and structured manner, probably as a result of previous interaction with major supermarkets chains. Both direct and indirect evidences of a shopper-centric approach were found, which, however, were slight, discrete and not formal.