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HOW CHINESE CONSUMERS RESPONSE TO FOOD NUTRITION CLAIM
With increasing income and education, requirements to product quality are getting higher in China. Specifically, people tend to nutrition and health now. Food safety has attracted increasing attention due to its importance. The nutrition claims on packaging became one of the most important standards to decide whether to buy.
A great deal of research has focused on consumer responses (e.g., Hieke and Taylor 2012; Parker & Lehmann 2014; Shah et al. 2014) to the influx of product information to markets. Topics of research included the impact on consumers’ beliefs with regards to products (Ford et al. 2005), purchasing behavior (Nikolova and Inman 2015), and information processing behavior (Moorman 1990). The diversity of consumer responses is based on consumer differences (Moorman 1990), and health- and nutrition-related (HNR) claims (Choi et al. 2013). Although a great deal of research has addressed the influence of product information disclosure on the market, these studies have focused almost exclusively on developed economies. Going forward it is very likely that emerging markets will play a more important part in corporate strategic planning, as opposed to something considered after making plans for long developed markets. Thus, the impact of market information is likely to matter more and more to those global marketers operating in emerging markets.
To fill the research gaps, we investigated how the existence and forms of nutrition claims affect the purchase intention of consumers in China. We explore the moderating role of consumer’s nutrition knowledge. We combine simulation experiment and questionnaire and design two experiments: Experiment 1 is about the existence of nutrition claims, we want to know how the existence of nutrition claims affects the purchase intention of consumers. Experiment 2 which is 2(health claims Vs function claims)×2 (promotion Vs prevention) test is to find out how the claim presentation forms impact the purchase intention of consumers. In experiment 1, we required the subjects to choose one setting randomly and fill in the questionnaires according to their choices. We collected 315 effective questionnaires of experiment 1and 156 effective questionnaires of experiment 2.
The results show that: (1) The existence of nutrition claims affects the purchase intention of consumers. specifically, compared with the product without health claims, consumers tend to choose the one with health claims, and compared with the product without function claims, consumers tend to choose the one with health claims.(2)Nutrition knowledge plays a positively role. Nutrition knowledge can change the effect of the existence of health claims and function claims on purchase intention.(3) Consumer trust only plays a partly moderate role. The consumer trust can increase the effect of the existence of function claims but not health claims on purchase intention.(4)The forms of nutrition claims affect consumers purchase intention. Consumers tend to choose the product with promotion claims more than the one with prevention claims.(5) Nutrition knowledge plays a positively role, it can improve the effect of the forms of health claims on purchase intention. The more nutritional knowledge does consumers comprehend, the more sensitive to the product with promotion claims they are.(6)Consumer trust also plays a positively role. The higher Consumer trust does consumers maintain, the more sensitive to the product with promotion claims they are.
