Anne Odile Peschel

The last five years of research on sustainability labelling, reported in 175 journal articles, documents its effectiveness in increasing consumer choices of more sustainable food products. Some sustainability labels come out as stronger than others and their impact varies across products, countries, and individual consumers, depending on label characteristics, knowledge, familiarity, and perceived issue importance. When combining multiple labels, each of them usually has a positive effect on choices, but their marginal effects are lower than if the label is used alone. Many consumers lack sufficient knowledge about certification requirements and benefits of labelled products, which leads to confusion and vulnerability to ‘greenwashing’ attempts. Also, high societal focus on one sustainability topic can divert limited attention away from other important topics. Hence, it is important for businesses to exercise restraint regarding uncertified claims and for policy to connect and balance sustainability issues and facilitate consumers' mental connections between certified sustainability labels.

Blockchain verification promises to enhance consumer confidence in the information provided on products and therefore could support the use of sustainability-related credence attributes in consumer decision-making. However, blockchain technology is complex and difficult to explain to consumers. We study the impact of blockchain verification on consumer use of sustainability characteristics when choosing meat products, taking into account the role of consumer understanding of blockchain, with an online discrete choice experiment with 500 consumers each in six European countries. We find that blockchain verification increases utilities for the sustainability attribute that consumers were most interested in, whereas no effect was found for less important attributes. We also found that blockchain verification decreases the importance of price. Both effects are moderated by consumer understanding of blockchain. The results indicate the importance of consumer education when it comes to the use of blockchain as a technology to further consumer trust in information about sustainability attributes when choosing food.

An increasing focus on diversity and inclusion initiatives can be observed in the marketplace with varying success in terms of consumer response. Online communities create a virtual space where consumers can interact independent of their self in the offline world. This creates a marketing opportunity to embrace diversity and the plethora of personas in the digital space. Our research focuses on the role of communicating membership diversity in attracting and importantly engaging new members in an online community. We conducted an online survey experiment with 3000 consumers across six European countries. We find that communicating membership diversity of an online community increases interest in joining this community. The increased interest in joining further increased engagement behavior. Diversity orientation is the main driver for this effect. We contribute to the literature by providing evidence of the positive effect of communicating membership diversity in online communities.

This study validates a VR supermarket as a research tool by studying the influence of the food shopping setting on consumers’ price memory—an important antecedent for price comparisons in the purchase situation. In a quasi-experiment, two groups of consumers were given a shopping task in either a physical supermarket or a virtual reality supermarket setting. Upon task completion, participants’ explicit and implicit price memory was measured across three food product categories (pizza sauce, pasta, and dark chocolate). Results revealed no significant difference between the two settings, supporting the comparability between the VR shopping experience and the experience in the physical supermarket. The VR supermarket can therefore be a valid tool for studying consumer food choice behaviour in a shopping context. Further results show that explicit price memory is weaker compared to implicit price memory, that even prices are remembered better than odd prices, and that price memory follows the expected pattern in a VR supermarket as well. Finally, exploratory findings indicate that the feeling of physical presence and self-presence is relatively high for this particular VR supermarket, whereas social presence is weaker.

When is an internal reference price selected for price judgements? This paper analyses how the combination of price and product attributes during the learning phase of internal reference prices influences reference price utilisation. We apply an experimental approach that accounts for two mechanisms of reference price learning. In two experiments, we vary the relationship between price and product attribute value. The results show that the internal reference price is only utilised in price judgements when a consistent relationship between previously observed prices and attribute values exists in the learning phase. This paper provides a unique approach to study reference price learning, which contributes to research by offering insight into the utilisation of reference prices. Results enable managers to strategically influence reference price learning and utilisation.