<p>Previous studies, as well as market sales data, show some consumers are willing to pay a premium for redundant or superfluous food labels that carry no additional information for the informed consumer. Some advocacy groups have argued that the use of such redundant labels is misleading or unethical. To determine whether premiums for redundant labels stem from misunderstanding or other factors, this study seeks to determine whether greater knowledge of the claims - in the form of expertise in food production and scientific literacy - decreases willingness to pay for redundant labels. We also explore whether de-biasing information influences consumers’ valuations of redundant labels. An online survey of 1,122 U.S. consumers elicits willingness-to-pay premiums for three redundantly labeled products: non-GMO sea salt, gluten-free orange juice, and no-hormone-added chicken breast. Respondents with farm experience report lower premiums for non-GMO salt and no-hormone-added chicken. Those with higher scientific literacy state lower premiums for gluten-free orange juice. However, provided information about the redundancy of the claims, less than half of respondents who were initially willing to pay extra for the label are convinced otherwise. Over 30% of respondents counter-intuitively increase their premiums, behavior that is associated with less <i>a priori</i> scientific knowledge. The likelihood of “overpricing” redundant labels is associated with willingness-to-pay premiums for organic food, suggesting at least some of the premium for organic is a result of misinformation. </p>

Purpose – This study provides a theoretical framework that explores the personality traits that influence style adoption among the youth in South Africa. Five personality traits form part of the framework, namely fashion consciousness, the need for uniqueness, susceptibility to interpersonal influence, individualism/collectivism, and masculinity/femininity. Methodology – A quantitative approach was undertaken and the data were collected by means of self-administered questionnaires among 400 university students. Established multi-item scales were adapted for the study, and a pilot test was used to confirm the validity of the multi-item scales and the correctness of the data-gathering procedure. Following the data gathering and coding, validity and reliability tests were carried out on the entire sample. A regression analysis was used to test the relationships between the constructs. Findings – The findings suggest that the dominant factors influencing style adoption are susceptibility to interpersonal influence and masculinity/femininity. Fashion consciousness, the need for uniqueness, individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity, influence the knowledge acquired of style. One’s attitude towards style is influenced by the need for uniqueness and masculinity/femininity. Research Limitations - The results of this study may not be appropriate for generalizing across the majority of youth culture in South Africa, and in a global context. However, understanding one segment of the youth may be beneficial to practitioners in South Africa, and may encourage exploration into other youth segments through continuous resampling and reassessment of difference ages and gender populations. Implications - By examining the youth and their sense of style, the study facilitates the possibility of consumer-behaviour research that not only includes style in a broad sense, but also explores post-modern and classic style expressions, thus providing a better understanding of modern youth culture in a local context, and the influence of their personality traits on style adoption.

The study’s aim was to determine how consumers relate to specific factors that affect the way in which fruit is marketed in supermarkets. This might have an influence on effective commercialization of new intellectual property in the global avocado industry.

The study’s aim was to determine how consumers relate to specific factors that affect the way in which fruit is marketed in supermarkets. This might have an influence on effective commercialization of new intellectual property in the global avocado industry.

The challenges of developing the information systems (IS) that support modern enterprises are becoming less about engineering and more about people. Many of the technical issues of the past, such as hardware size and power, connectivity, and robust software, are engineering problems that have largely been solved. In the next stage of computing, the human factor will be far more important than it has been in the past: the colors of an interface or the shape of an icon are the engineering problems of the past, and the availability and usefulness of such basic solutions is rapidly coming to a close. A new paradigm is needed that provides a roadmap of higher level conceptions and values, one about humane computing. A part of this older, mechanistic approach are quantitative, economic values whose impact on IS are readily visible and acknowledged within software engineering. However, qualitative values, and in particular consumer preferences, have been researched to a lesser degree, and there has been very little direct application.  To create the next-generation information systems, requirements engineers and systems developers need new methods to capture the real preferences of consumers, conceptualize these abstract concepts, and then relate such preferences to concrete requirements for information systems. To address this problem, this thesis establishes a conceptual link between the preferences of consumers and system requirements by accommodating the variations between them and expressing them via a conceptual model. Modeling such preferences and values so that they can be used as requirements for IS development is the primary contribution of this work. This is accomplished via a design science research paradigm to support the creation of the works’ primary artifact—the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM is intended to improve the alignment between business and information systems by capturing and concretizing the real preferences of consumers and then expressing such preferences via the requirements engineering process, with the eventual output being information systems. CPMM’s development relies on theoretical research contributions within three areas in information systems—Business Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Requirements Engineering—whose relationships to consumer values have been under-researched and under-applied. The case studies included in this thesis each demonstrate the significance of consumer preferences to each of these three areas.  In the first, a set of logical mappings between CPMM and a common approach to business strategy (strategy maps/balanced scorecards) is produced. In the second, CPMM provides the conceptual undergirding to process a massive amount of unstructured consumer-generated text to generate system requirements for the airline industry. In the concluding case, an investigation of foreign and domestic students at Swedish universities is structured through CPMM, one that first discovers the requirements for a consumer preference-based online education and then produces feature models for such a software product line-based system. The significance of CPMM as a lens for discovering new concepts and highlighting important information within consumer preference data is clearly seen, and the usefulness of the meta-model is demonstrated by its broad and beneficial applicability within information systems practice and research.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Kevin Gwinner / Under the leadership of the Van Eekeren family, Land O’ Frost has become one of the fastest growing meat processing manufacturers in the United States. “Premium” is Land O’ Frost’s flagship brand which makes up 57% of the company’s total sales dollars. Of the line of Premium lunchmeats, Honey Smoked Turkey is ranked #3 in total sales dollars. However, if you rank the product’s performance by dividing its all commodity volume (ACV) by the number of pounds sold, it is ranked #7 out of the nine single pack flavors offered in retail. There has been internal speculation that the Honey Smoked Turkey’s sales performance is related to a lack of honey/sweetness flavor in the lunchmeat. As a result, Land O’ Frost needed to determine if the current level of honey/sweetness flavor of the Honey Smoked Turkey needs to be increased in order to stimulate higher growth in sales. A third party consultant conducted a consumer test between Land O’ Frost’s honey smoked turkey and their top two competitors’ honey smoked turkey. Based on the results, the Land O’ Frost product was the least likely preferred and was rated as having the lowest sweetness flavor profile among the three products. In an effort to develop a sweeter tasting honey turkey, different test formulations were developed using different honeys, levels of honey and sweeteners. The lighter the honey grade the less flavor impact was present in the turkey. As a result, a test formula containing twice the amount of light amber honey and the maximum amount of sugar was developed to be sweeter and to offer better marketing claims to potentially attract more customers. Due to product process differences between the Land O’ Frost’s honey smoked turkey and its competitor’s, the decision was made to conduct another consumer test between the current control and the newly formulated test product. The data determined that there was not a significant difference between the two products tested. A triangle test was conducted via a third party and it also confirmed the same conclusion. With the test formula having a slightly higher cost per pound than the current control formula, it was decided internally that the test formula could replace the current formula if the test formula price per pound can be adjusted to the same cost as the control. I would recommend that the level of sugar in the new test formula be slightly decreased until the formula cost per pound is the same as the control. The cost of meat raw materials used by Land O’ Frost often changes due to market price conditions. The new formulated honey smoked turkey’s selling potential would still have a positive impact by utilizing claims such as “double the honey” and “lower sodium” on the package. In this case, the selling potential increase would be more heavily executed from a marketing perspective than from flavor development.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / While understanding consumer decisions about food choices is complex, the nature of wines makes it even more difficult to decipher how consumers arrive at their choices. Given the perceived importance of "local", how willing are consumers to pay for locally-produced wine? And, what characteristics of the wine influence the premium that consumers pay for it? These are the two related questions that this research seeks to address. The research uses a case study approach to explore how five wine characteristics of local Kansas wine influence the premium consumers are willing to pay. The five characteristics are appearance, aroma, body, taste and finish. The study uses four pairs of wine in the following groups: sweet white, dry white, semi-sweet red and dry red. Each pair is made up of a Kansas wine and a non-Kansas wine. A very well-defined set of focus group participants were invited to taste these wine without knowing the identity of the wines and score them according to their characteristics and then provide an indication of how much they are willing to pay. The case results indicate that the focus group participants were willing to discount Kansas wines in all cases of the four pairs. The factors affecting the discount were finish for sweet white wines, appearance for sweet red wines, taste and aroma for dry white and dry red wines. The implication of this exploratory case study is that while most local residents proclaim their willingness to pay a premium for local wines, when tested against national or international competitors, consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for these local wines because the local wines lack the desired quality the international wines have. The information is important because it provides direction for an entrepreneur seeking to develop local wines to focus on understanding and addressing the characteristics which influence consumers' willingness to pay a premium even as she determines which particular wines current players in the local Kansas industry has the potential to be competitive if they address the characteristics upon which they are penalized by consumers. This, despite this being an exploratory case study, it provides important direction for entrepreneurial action.

Background: Today, advertising is a multi-billion industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people and affecting billions of people’s lives worldwide. Yet, seeing as advertising clutter has increased tremendously and is more intense than ever, it is vital that companies differentiate themselves from competitors by creating even more powerful, entertaining and innovative advertisement messages, as well as sponsoring different events. Examples of such companies that spend billion of dollars on marketing strategies in order to stay key players in their industry are The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. Purpose: The overall purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of different international and local factors affecting consumer preferences on a local market. Method: A quantitative method was applied, and thus a questionnaire with 150 respondents on the local market was conducted. The respondents were divided into three different age groups: ≤ 18, 19-34, and ≥ 35, and represent a diverse set of people who are at different stages in their lives. Conclusions: International advertising and international sponsorship respectively influence the local target group in different ways, but they also affect international brand in that they have an impact on brand image and brand equity. Moreover, depending on a person’s age, consumers view brands differently, and thus have an effect on international brand alone, but also in combination with international advertisement and international sponsorship. Together, these factors influence the way in which a brand is perceived, and consequently influence consumer preferences.

<p>Background: Today, advertising is a multi-billion industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people and affecting billions of people’s lives worldwide. Yet, seeing as advertising clutter has increased tremendously and is more intense than ever, it is vital that companies differentiate themselves from competitors by creating even more powerful, entertaining and innovative advertisement messages, as well as sponsoring different events. Examples of such companies that spend billion of dollars on marketing strategies in order to stay key players in their industry are The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.</p><p>Purpose: The overall purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of different international and local factors affecting consumer preferences on a local market.</p><p>Method: A quantitative method was applied, and thus a questionnaire with 150 respondents on the local market was conducted. The respondents were divided into three different age groups: ≤ 18, 19-34, and ≥ 35, and represent a diverse set of people who are at different stages in their lives.</p><p>Conclusions: International advertising and international sponsorship respectively influence the local target group in different ways, but they also affect international brand in that they have an impact on brand image and brand equity. Moreover, depending on a person’s age, consumers view brands differently, and thus have an effect on international brand alone, but also in combination with international advertisement and international sponsorship. Together, these factors influence the way in which a brand is perceived, and consequently influence consumer preferences.</p>

Despite continued polarization along political party lines, it remains unclear how differences in political ideology impact the choices consumers make. The results of seven studies indicate that political ideology profoundly influences the way consumers think and behave. Liberals and conservatives are systematically drawn to distinct choice preferences where liberals prefer hedonic, novel, and desirable options, while conservatives prefer utilitarian, status quo, and feasible options. These findings are robust for multiple measures of political ideology across multiple choice sets. Differences in behavior are explained by the amount of deliberation used for a given decision. Liberals deliberate more than conservatives as they are more open to information while conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguous information. Implications for consumers, marketers, and policy makers are provided.