Search results

The case study offers interesting learning possibilities and offers the following learning opportunities to the learner. assess and conduct a macro- and micro-environmental analysis, comprehend the nature of the competitive landscape and how it changes when one looks at a digital-only versus an omnichannel marketplace, examine the product mix and policy of the firm and evaluate how it delivers customer value and analyse the pros and cons of growth strategies available to a firm and arrive at a viable and actionable future business and product strategy.

The short case study presents the story of a young start-up called Country Delight. The firm began operations in 2011 and was the brainchild of Chakradhar Gade and Nitin Kaushal. The direct-to-consumer firm addressed urban consumers’ non-articulated, latent need to get “fresh and uncontaminated” milk to their doorstep. Country Delight delivered farmer-to-consumer fresh cow and buffalo milk and milk products based on a well-designed and efficient value chain where the supply chain was either wholly owned or quality monitored by the firm. The firm began operations in India’s National Capital Region and was spread across 15 metro cities. Slowly, over the years, Gade and Kaushal added more product categories.Country Delight had a subscriber base of around 500,000, and the ambitious duo wanted to double their subscriber base and reach one million subscribers by financial year 2025. The firm was looking at various paths to achieve this number. Should Country Delight expand into new geographies? Or look at adding to the existing product portfolio? Diversification into agritourism, like the Pune-based vineyard – Sula, also looked attractive to build consumer engagement. Would taking the consumer to the farmers from whom they sourced the milk and vegetables contribute additional revenue to Country Delight and their farmer-suppliers? As the firm got ready to raise another round of funding, it needed a well-articulated growth strategy that was exciting and profitable for all stakeholders.

This case study presents the dilemma entrepreneurs face as they look at the next phase of growth. Thus, this case study serves as a learning opportunity for a graduate-level course in management and as a sounding board for those who aspire to enter the start-up space. Though this case study has the potential to illustrate basic concepts such as value chain and macro- and micro-environment analysis, the protagonist’s dilemma and the problem statement make it apt for integrated discussions that are critical in advanced electives in marketing management.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The authors analysed fairness as an antecedent of trust to understand how trust building can be actively managed to facilitate collaboration in buyer–supplier relationships.

A case study was employed to buyer–supplier relationships of five organic food companies from three different sectors. The research was developed with data collected in 2022 through qualitative research interviews and analysed using a structured content analysis. A practitioner workshop served to complement findings and confirm the interpretation of data by discussing interview results from a managerial perspective.

A conceptual model based on organisational trust and justice theory was developed to examine causal relations between fairness and trust. Findings show that perceived distributional, procedural and interactional fairness mutually interact with the perceived trustworthiness of business partners and that both contribute to building personal, organisational and institutional trust. Qualitative data support the conceptual model and show that trust is a valuable relational resource that affects relationship quality and the willingness to collaborate and to take risks in times of uncertainty.

High trust levels developed through positive fairness perceptions can lower risk perceptions whilst increasing the willingness to collaborate in supply chain relationships. This can help deal with market uncertainties.

Through the lens of organisational trust and justice theory, this study extends the literature on collaboration in supply chains by including a comprehensive view on the formation of trust in business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

The study employs two independent experimental studies to collect data. It focuses on the matching effect between advertising appeals and product types. The Elaboration Likelihood Model serves as the theoretical framework for understanding the cognitive processing involved in consumers' responses to these advertising appeals and product combinations.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of advertising appeals on consumers' intentions to purchase organic food. We explored the interaction between advertising appeals (egoistic vs altruistic) and product types (virtue vs vice) and purchase intention. The goal is to provide insights that can enhance the advertising effectiveness of organic food manufacturers and retailers.

The analysis reveals significant effects on consumers' purchase intentions based on the matching of advertising appeals with product types. Specifically, when egoistic appeals align with virtuous products, there is an improvement in consumers' purchase intentions. When altruistic appeals match vice products, a positive impact on purchase intention is observed. The results suggest that the matching of advertising appeals with product types enhances processing fluency, contributing to increased purchase intention.

This research contributes to the field by providing nuanced insights into the interplay between advertising appeals and product types within the context of organic food. The findings highlight the importance of considering the synergy between egoistic appeals and virtuous products, as well as altruistic appeals and vice products. This understanding can be strategically employed by organic food manufacturers and retailers to optimize their advertising strategies, thereby improving their overall effectiveness in influencing consumers' purchase intentions.

Globally, consumer’s inclination towards functional foods had noticed due to their greater health consciousness coupled with enhanced health-care cost. The fact that probiotics could promote a healthier gut microbiome led projection of probiotic foods as functional foods and had emerged as an important dietary strategy for improved human health. It had established that ice cream was a better carrier for probiotics than fermented milked due to greater stability of probiotics in ice cream matrix. Global demand for ice cream boomed and probiotic ice cream could have been one of the most demanded functional foods. The purpose of this paper was to review the technological aspects and factors affecting probiotic viability and to standardize methodology to produce functional probiotic ice cream.

Attempt was made to search the literature (review and researched papers) to identify diverse factors affecting the probiotic viability and major technological challenge faced during formulation of probiotic ice cream. Keywords used for data searched included dairy-based functional foods, ice cream variants, probiotic ice cream, factors affecting probiotic viability and health benefits of probiotic ice cream.

Retention of probiotic viability at a level of >10⁶ cfu/ml is a prerequisite for functional probiotic ice creams. Functional probiotic ice cream could have been produced with the modification of basic mix and modulating technological parameters during processing and freezing. Functionality can be further enhanced with the inclusion of certain nutraceutical components such as prebiotics, antioxidant, phenolic compounds and dietary fibres. Based upon reviewed literature, suggested method for the manufacture of functional probiotic ice cream involved freezing of a probiotic ice cream mix obtained by blending 10% probiotic fermented milk with 90% non-fermented plain ice cream mix for higher probiotic viability. Probiotic ice cream with functional features, comparable with traditional ice cream in terms of technological and sensory properties could be produced and can crop up as a novel functional food.

Probiotic ice cream with functional features may attract food manufacturers to cater health-conscious consumers.

This paper aims to study the color change kinetics of lac dye in response to pH and food spoilage metabolites (ammonia, lactic acid and tyramine) for its potential application in intelligent food packaging.

UV-Vis spectroscopy was used to study the color change of dye solution. Ratio of absorbance of dye solution at 528 nm (peak of ionized form) to absorbance at 488 nm (peak of unionized form) was used to study the color change. Color change kinetics was studied in terms of change in absorbance ratio (A528/A488) with time using zero- and first-order reaction kinetics. An indicator was prepared by incorporating lac dye in agarose membrane to validate the result of study for monitoring quality of raw milk.

Dye was orange-red in acidic medium (pH: 2 to 5) and exhibited absorbance peak at 488 nm. It turned purple in alkaline medium (pH: 7 to10) and exhibited absorbance peak at 528 nm. The change in absorbance ratio with pH followed zero-order model. Acid dissociation constant (pKa) of dye was found to be 6.3. Color change of dye in response to ammonia and tyramine followed zero-order reaction kinetics, whereas for lactic acid, the first-order model was found best. In the validation part, the color of the indicator label changed from purple to orange-red when the milk gets spoiled.

The study opens a new application area for lac dye. The results suggest that lac dye has potential to be used as an indicator in intelligent food packaging for detection of spoilage in seafood, meat, poultry and milk.

Using a generic cheese as an anchor product, in this study consumers' preferences for different EU quality schemes have been investigated. Specifically, the study aims to understand whether “Protected Designation of Origin” (PDO), “Organic” and “Mountain Product” labels are independent or if there are some synergies existing between them, questioning – at the same time – whether this alleged exchange of value plays a positive or negative role in terms of consumers' willingness to pay.

A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted on 600 Italian consumers performing a random parameter logit model. The respondents were representative of the Italian population in terms of age, gender and geographical distribution. Consumers' preferences for the presence of “Organic” and “Mountain product” labels were assessed in the DCE, together with the effect of price, for both PDO and generic cheeses.

Consumers are willing to pay a premium in price for “Organic” and “Mountain Product” per se, for cheese with and without the PDO denomination. Considering the interaction effects, results showed that the combined use of “Organic” and “Mountain Product” labels do not decrease consumers' intention to buy. However, when applied on a PDO product, these attributes generate a lower consumers' willingness to pay in comparison with the generic ones, highlighting a possible overlapping between them.

Despite the abundant literature on EU quality schemes in many food categories, this study represents one of the first attempts to measure the interaction effect between different EU quality schemes.

Both governments and the food industry are interested in plant-based products. New products are advertised as climate-friendly, with plant-based materials increasingly replacing animal-based content. In Finland, oat milk dominates the plant-based milk market. The authors studied what features young and urban users of plant-based and cow's milk value in oat milk for coffee and how the preferences of the users relate to ethical food-choice motives.

In total, 308 students filled in an e-questionnaire. The survey used best-worst scaling (BWS), a discrete choice approach, to measure the perceived values related to oat milk characteristics. The ethical motives were measured by a version of the Lindeman and Väänänen scale. Also the respondents' diets were asked. Preference clusters were identified and viewed with the ethical food-choice motives and diets.

The respondent group that exclusively used cow's milk attached more value to taste, added nutritional elements, discounts and recommendations by friends. The rest of the respondents attached more value to origin and sustainability-related features of oat milk. In the six-cluster solution, one extreme cluster was valuing taste and the other was valuing sustainability-related issues. All the ethical food-choice motives: ecological welfare, political values and religion were (roughly) the higher the cluster valued sustainability-related items. The respondents eating meat were more likely to belong to the clusters valuing taste than non-meat eaters that belong more likely to clusters valuing sustainability-related features.

Very few earlier studies have explored the heterogeneity of valuations of plant-based products and the products' relationship with ethical food-choice motives.

This study aims to examine the most influential drivers, both product-specific and consumer-specific, affecting Asian consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for organic olive oil.

To individuate the most influential drivers of WTP for organic products and to assess their effect, in terms of configurational paths and consumer profiles, this study sequentially employs explorative factor analysis approach and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method. The survey is carried out in different areas of Asia (e.g. Pakistan, Vietnam and China).

The results suggest that Asian consumers' WTP for organic products is described by consumer-specific drivers (gender, occupation and household size) as well as product-specific drivers (product authenticity and sustainability, consumer ethnocentrism and food fraud risk perception).

The findings of the study permit the identification of different drivers that move consumers' WTP for organic olive oil. The study contributes to setting the ground for companies to propose and implement efficacious marketing strategies for organic olive oil in importing countries, such as Asia.

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants impacting consumer behaviour in organic food consumption in Bangladesh. This study aims to identify the key factors facilitating organic food consumption and establish a framework by analysing their contextual relationships.

The study used interpretive structural modelling (ISM), relying on expert perspectives from experienced academicians and marketing professionals. A Matrice d'Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliqués à un Classement (MICMAC) analysis was performed to assess the driving forces and interdependencies among these determinants.

The MICMAC analysis grouped determinants influencing organic food purchases into four categories. The dependent factors, like attitude and food safety, showed moderate driving forces and high dependence. Linkage determinants, such as environmental concern and price, exerted considerable influence with moderate dependence. Independent variables, especially knowledge about organic food, had a strong impact with relatively low dependence.

This study’s insights offer valuable guidance for managers in the organic food industry, providing strategies to address consumer behaviour. Prioritising education on environmental benefits, transparent pricing, collaborating on policies, ensuring food safety and understanding determinants impacting purchase intent can aid in designing effective marketing strategies and product offerings aligned with consumer needs, ultimately promoting sustainability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the interconnections and relative significance of determinants influencing organic food purchases, using the ISM approach and MICMAC analysis. It delves into the previously unexplored territory of understanding the relationships and hierarchical significance of these determinants in shaping consumer behaviour towards organic food purchases.