David K. Holdsworth

Determinants of trust in imported food products: perceptions of European gatekeepers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the elements of country image that influence gatekeepers of the European food distribution sector when making industrial purchasing decisions regarding imported food products.Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth interviews were conducted with key informants of seventeen food distribution companies and industry organisations in five European countries to determine the factors that they consider important when deciding from which countries to source food products.Findings – Confidence and trust in production systems, the integrity of regulatory systems, and the reliability of suppliers appear to be the major determinants of product‐country image as viewed by gatekeepers of the food distribution channel.Practical implications – These specific factors relating to confidence, trust, integrity and reputation appear to over‐ride more general perceptions of country image based on scenic or environmental considerations.Originality/value – Provides useful infor...

Social Stigma and Consumer Benefits: Trade-Offs in Adoption of Genetically Modified Foods

Attitudes toward genetically modified (GM) foods have been extensively studied, but there are very few studies of actual consumer purchasing behavior regarding GM foods offering a consumer benefit. Using a field choice-modeling experiment, the authors investigate the trade-off between price and social desirability in consumer choices with regard to conventional, organic, and GM fruit. What consumers say they will choose in a survey and what they actually choose in a real-purchase situation may differ substantially when their decision is framed by a socially charged issue such as genetic modification. The results are analyzed in relation to established principles of diffusion of innovation.

Pricing differentials for organic, ordinary and genetically modified food

Purpose – Aims to conduct research on consumer willingness to buy genetically modified (GM) foods with a price advantage and other benefits, compared with organic and ordinary types of foods, employing a robust experimental method. The importance of this increases as the volume and range of GM foods grown and distributed globally increase, as consumer fears surrounding perceived risk decrease and consumer benefits are communicated.Design/methodology/approach – In contrast with survey‐based experiments, which lack credibility with some practitioners and academics, customers chose amongst three categories of fruit (organic, GM, and ordinary) with experimentally designed levels of price in a roadside stall in a fruit‐growing region of New Zealand. Buyers were advised, after choosing, that all the fruit was standard produce, and the experiment was revealed. Data were analysed with multi‐nomial logit models.Findings – Increasing produce type and price sensitivity coefficient estimates were found in order from ...

Genetically modified crops and country image of food exporting countries

Purpose – Many countries have held back from planting genetically modified (GM) food crops due to perceived negative reaction in export and domestic markets. Three lines of research have tested the reality of this fear.Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth interviews were conducted in European countries with key companies and organisations in the European food sector. Supermarket intercepts were used to ascertain purchasing intent for products from countries that do or do not produce GM crops. A purchasing experiment was conducted, where cherries labelled as GM, organic or conventional were on sale in a roadside stall.Findings – Food distribution channel members expressed concern about possibility of contamination or mix‐up between GM and non‐GM food. However, presence of GM crops in a country does not cause negative perception of food in general from that country. Approximately 30 per cent of consumers in the purchasing experiment proved willing to purchase GM cherries when there was a defined consumer ...

Impact of cultural values on young consumers' choice of international tertiary education

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the following choice issues among young consumers (Generation Y): how cultural values influence a student’s decision on study destinations, and how cultural values influence student’s preferred sources of information for university choice? High school students from Singapore and Malaysia, intending to study in New Zealand were surveyed with an instrument based on Schwartz’s Value Survey and the understanding that cultural values are a powerful force shaping consumers’ motivations, lifestyles and product choices.The results of this research suggests that cultural values have an impact on student’s intended choice of international tertiary education and their preferred sources of information for university enrollment. The results have important implications for marketers of export education. There are few studies which try to understand how cultural values influence a student’s decision on study destinations and their preferred sources of information for university choice.

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election:

In this article, we report the results of a study that tested a values-based method of predicting political election results. The study was carried out on the 2014 New Zealand General Election, randomly selecting a stratified sample from a consumer panel. The survey of 858 participants used open-ended questions to invoke and capture values relevant to the election. By using corpus linguistic analysis techniques, terms were ranked by weighting based on a log-frequency entropy method. Lexicons for Lasswell and Kaplan’s societal value framework reduced the corpus of term-weighted documents to a workable number of eight user-defined societal value-topics. The topics were regressed onto the individual voting decision using a multinomial logit (MNL) regression. The mean absolute deviation (MAD) from the actual vote was 1.8%, much less than the margin of error of 3.5% expected from sampling error alone. The methodology was successful in predicting the outcome for the minor parties with good accuracy, for example, the prediction for the then newly formed Internet-Mana was out by about 0.5%. The framing-balanced, value-based predictions exhibited reasonable stability, considering they were made six weeks before Election Day. Thus the values relevant to the voters and a good prediction of the voting behavior became evident ahead of the official campaign period, which started four weeks before Election Day in New Zealand. Our study concluded that the value-based prediction shows promise for improving the quality of political journalism and public engagement in the period of election campaigns, and will assist greatly in focusing public debate more on values that are influential on citizens’ voting decisions.