Consumer concepts in new product development of local foods: Traditional versus novel honeys

Highlights

• Traditional and novel local honeys were separated by different concepts.

• The concepts captured more information than simple product liking.

• Familiarity was positively conceptualised with respect to the local honeys.

• Novel local honeys could be too novel for the consumers.

• Appropriateness measure is important to indicate potential barriers for purpose.

Abstract

To understand consumer perception of local foods and guide product development for small scale producers, the present study focuses on consumer concepts and appropriateness for use of traditional versus novel local honeys. Traditional and novel local honeys were distinguished by the different concepts, and these concepts captured additional product information other than purely how much one ‘liked’ the product. The traditional local honeys were predominantly liked and understood from a conceptual perspective as familiar, typical Danish (related to national identity) and balanced, leading to emotional responses of joy and excited. All the novel local honeys were associated with unique. However, the results for the novel local honeys displayed mixed conceptual associations and elicited surprised and some negative expressions of emotions. Thus, familiarity appeared to be positively considered with respect to the local honeys whilst novel honeys could be ‘too’ novel for the consumers resulting in negative emotional responses. The appropriateness measurements were very important to indicate potential barriers for purpose of use. This study provided consumer concepts linked to traditional and novel products which may be useful in positioning and communication about local foods in the marketplace.

Introduction

A growing consumer interest in more differentiated food products has been observed in the recent years, herein traditional local foods. Traditional local foods have been described as foods from a certain local area produced in a traditional way and having specific sensory properties (Guerrero et al., 2009). However, food product development is necessary for survival of the product in a competitive global market (Stewart-Knox & Mitchell, 2003). Incongruence appears between new product development and traditional local foods as the local food will potentially not be considered traditional anymore. Another issue with product development is that more than 90% of all new developed products in the food and beverage market fail (Business Insight, 2004). This is often explained by the use of inappropriate and inadequate criteria for evaluating the likelihood of a future market success. Thus, a need exists to explore new and different methods to evaluate and understand consumer behaviour towards new product development in order to successfully guide how to develop the market on novel attractive local foods resulting in larger product diversity.

An approach could be to study the various dimensionalities involved in consumer understanding of traditional versus novel local foods. As consumer evaluations of food products are not solely based on liking of sensory characteristics but also related to the concepts that consumers associate with them (Mela, 2000), a deeper understanding of concept associations could be interesting to study. Concepts refer to cognitive organisation of information of objects and events (Nelson, 1974). The principle of concept formation involves abstraction and generalisation (Nelson, 1974, O'Mahony, 1991) and can be defined as constructions created in the mind that allow us to interpret, understand and assign meaning to perceptual experiences (Thomson, Crocker, & Marketo, 2010).

In the present paper, we refer to concepts as semantics describing associated meaning with what is perceived and we utilise the framework for categorisation of concepts as set down by Thomson et al. (2010), herein functional, emotional and abstract concepts. The functional concepts refer to what the product does for the consumer, e.g. the taste of the product enhances my wanting to eat more, the emotional concepts relate to how the product makes the consumer feel e.g. the odour makes me feel happy, and the abstract concepts include e.g. the food is complex. Relationships between these concept categories appear i.e. one concept can lead to association with another concept. Herein, abstract concepts can lead to functional concepts eliciting emotional responses. By changing the perceptual properties of a product, it might be expected that the concept association with it might change as well.

Understanding of consumers' conceptualisation of food has been very limitedly studied until recently. Some of the few studies addressing the topic, include Moskowitz (1998) and Carr, Craig-Petsinger, and Hadlich (2001) linking sensory attributes and image attributes (conceptualisations), and Guerrero et al. (2010), Vanhonacker et al. (2010) and Almli, Verbeke, Vanhonacker, Næs, and Hersleth (2011) studying consumers' associations and thus conceptualisations of traditional foods. More specifically, emotional concepts have been investigated within food science. Ferrarini et al. (2010) developed a list with emotional concepts to explain consumers' emotions associated with wine. Desmet and Schifferstein (2008) studied food related and context-related stimulus using 11 pleasant and 11 unpleasant emotions. Lastly, King and Meiselman (2010) found that 36 out of 39 emotional concepts were significant in differentiating tested food products.

Besides understanding the consumers' concept associations with a food product, identification of product appropriateness for use is crucial in product development (Jack, Piggott, & Paterson, 1994). Schutz, Rucker, and Russell (1975) and Schutz, 1988, Schutz, 1994 introduced the measure “appropriateness for use”. This detailed approach is applicable for measuring a wide variety of consumption conditions, including uses/situations/attributes. These attributes elicit information on when it would be appropriate to use such items and hereby improve the product understanding and product positioning (Cardello & Schutz, 1996).

It is expected that the degree of product familiarity influences the consumer responses as concept associations are based on life experience i.e. learning with increasing familiarity (Nelson, 1974, Thomson et al., 2010). However, if consensus exists among the consumer conceptualisations for a specific product, these concepts can be applied in market strategies in terms of branding products to create expectations and load emotions (Moskowitz, Reisner, Itty, Katz, & Krieger, 2006). Almli et al. (2011) stress that if a product should be successful on the market and lead to purchase, it must benefit from a positive image and match the expectations with the perception of product attributes.

The main objective was to investigate if specific dimensions were involved in consumer conceptualisations of traditional versus novel local foods. In the present paper, a ‘novel’ product refers to a newly developed product unfamiliar to the consumers. Statements on appropriateness for use were also included as they provide information about how the honeys were suitable for consumption and thus additional important consumer information. The outcome can be utilised to assist and guide successful product development for small scale producers and hereby avoid a high failure rate of their new products.