This study was conducted to investigate whether there were differences in eco-friendly food, home meal replacement (HMR) purchases, and eating-out behavior according to the level of agri-food consumer competence. The data for the study were extracted from main food consumers (n=3,321) in the 2022 Food Consumption Behavior Survey. The competence index was divided into awareness-attitude-practice items, and three groups were classified by competence level. The results showed an agri-food consumer competency score of 70.62, with the highest score for awareness (73.96), followed by practice (69.28) and attitude (66.18). The frequency of purchasing eco-friendly food was higher in the excellent group compared to other groups, and quality and price satisfaction was higher with higher competency (p<0.001). Regarding HMR, the results showed that the shortage group had the lowest HMR consumption rate, and satisfaction decreased as competence decreased (p<0.001). The main reason for eating-out was to enjoy food in all groups (59.0%), followed by a lack of cooking time in the excellent group (15.7%) and hassle with food preparation in the moderate and shortage groups (17.3%, 16.6%) (p<0.001). In short, agri-food consumption competency showed differences by contents and components, and differences in food purchases and eating-out behavior by competency level were found.

This research analyzes the influence of children on their parents’ personal purchases. Prior research focuses on children’s influence on family purchases and products consumed by children themselves. There is a knowledge gap in whether and how children influence personal purchases of their parents. Building on reciprocal theory, this research proposes that children have influence on their parents’ personal item purchases because of attitude exchange. This reciprocal influence and attitude exchange should be derived from co-shopping frequency. That is, the greater the interaction between the two parties – especially at the point of purchase, which is co-shopping – the greater the reciprocity. Additionally, this influence increases as parents age. In order to test the research questions, mothers were chosen as respondents because they are the primary caregivers for children, and as a result, there should be high reciprocal influence between mothers and their children. A sample of 304 mothers with a mean age of 46.6 years participated in this study. The results support the first hypothesis that the co-shopping frequency between parents and children positively influences parents’ personal purchases. The results also support the second hypotheses that the parents’ age positively influences the children’s influence on parents’ personal purchases. This is in line with prior research which determined that children become more influential as they grow older. To my knowledge, this paper is the first to extend the knowledge of children’s influence on family-decision making – beyond selecting products for the children and products for the family – to the influence on personal purchases of parents.

This paper attempts to bring the rather dated concept of Cultural Capital (CC) from the sociology literature to luxury retailing; it argues that Visual Merchandise Display (VMD) can enhance the consumers’ intentions to purchase luxury brands but this influence is stronger for consumers with higher CC than for those with lower CC. In particular, we develop a psychometric scale to measure CC and empirically and quantitatively investigate in two experiments the impact of VMD on consumer purchase intentions and the moderating role of CC. Walking first into TK Maxx and then into Harvey Nichols, one could assume that brand perceptions are affected not by the merchandise but rather by the store environment and particularly the way in which the products are visually presented to the consumers. In 2013, Karen Miller announced a substantial remodelling of its stores, including a change in their look to communicate ‘affordable luxury’ (Felsted, 2013). Although the luxury marketers seem to understand the importance of the display in influencing consumer perceptions, academics yet admit to knowing very little about the role of visual merchandising and display on the mechanisms of luxury brand consumption (Joy, Wang, Chan, Sherry, & Cui, 2014). Emerging research in the luxury retailing literature focuses on and explores qualitatively the role of ‘museological’ product presentation techniques in building and sustaining a luxury brand image (Dion & Arnould, 2011; Joy et al., 2014). However, till now, it has not considered that people can differ in their ability (i.e., ‘connoisseurship’) to decode and appreciate such display techniques, which often require substantial investment in fixtures, expensive materials, or complicated designs or architecture. This paper argues that the success of many newly introduced marketing communication techniques, including the tendency of contemporary branding to ‘subtly’ communicate the understated cleverness of a brand, can be subject to the consumers’ level of CC. CC refers to human culture and constitutes an individual characteristic that encompasses consumer’s intangible cultural assets and resources, such as knowledge, personality traits, and values, which manifest via consumers’ lifestyle choices and affect the way they think and act (Bourdieu, 1984; Blackwell, Miniard, & Engel, 2001). We argue that in luxury retailing, where ‘brand museums’ (Hollenbeck, 2008), ‘museological’ product presentation techniques or simply ‘museum like displays’ (Joy et al., 2014) and collaboration with contemporary artists and creative directors (Dion and Arnould, 2011) have been pointed out as new formats of in-store communication, CC can play a crucial role in explaining whether and how much consumers’ purchases can be actually affected. The marketing literature, to date, however, misses a contemporary continuous measure to assess consumers’ CC. In their effort to avoid limitations embedded in prior conceptualisations of CC— which mostly concern its supposed static and inherited nature (McQuarrie, Miller, & Phillips, 2013) —, many studies of consumer behaviour tend to assess CC qualitatively and set criteria to dichotomise a sample into two groups who are somewhat arbitrarily classified as people with either high or low CC; or, they only approximate CC by assessing the participants’ knowledge in a specific field of consumption, which is often a crude proxy for CC and pre-supposes the consumers’ interest-involvement in the investigated field of consumption (McQuarrie et al., 2013). For example, the literature on luxury brands tends to replace CC with fashion knowledge (e.g., Berger & Ward, 2010). Nevertheless, the researchers recognise this replacement as a limitation of their studies and a poor operationalisation of the concept of CC (Berger & Ward, 2010). The present research has three objectives. First, rather than dichotomising people into high and low CC groups, it acknowledges CC as a continuous variable and develops a contemporary psychometric scale to measure the extent to which people within the same culture differ in it. Second, it aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding a set of mechanisms that explain how consumers’ purchase intentions for a luxury brand can be affected by specific VMD cues which are used for displaying it. Last and more importantly, we want to validate the newly introduced scale in a final experiment that tests whether the process whereby VMD indirectly increases the purchase intentions for luxury brands, depends positively on the consumer’s CC. The first study, which incorporates a qualitative inquiry as well as a purification and a validation study and uses multiple samples, succeeds in developing and validating a psychometric CC scale. In the second study, by conducting an experiment, we develop a model which explains how a combination of specific high-image VMD cues that form a museum-like display affects the consumers’ luxury brand purchase intentions by increasing consumers’ perceptions of luxury and by decreasing their perceived personal risk. This study’s model is, then, re-estimated in the final study after introducing into it the measure of CC. In this experiment, the strength of the basic relationships was found to be contingent on CC, suggesting that consumers with higher CC tend to be more strongly influenced by the store environment cues. Although we recognise that for many consumer behaviour studies in the marketing literature, consumers’ knowledge in fashion represents sufficiently well the concept of CC (e.g., Berger & Ward, 2010; McQuarrie et al., 2013; Parmentier, Fischer, & Reuber, 2013), we show that this might not be the case in the context of store atmospherics. In particular, we test the influence of both CC and fashion knowledge by introducing them together into the same model. Interestingly, CC is found to behave differently and to some extent oppositely to fashion knowledge in influencing consumers’ store-induced perceptions and purchase intentions for the luxury brand on display. The identification of specific VMD cues that form what the luxury retailing literature rather vaguely describes as a ‘museological presentation’ and the measurement of their combined effect as a ‘museum-like display’ on the consumer’s perceptions and behavioural intentions can have important implications for both the offline and online retailers. Our findings can also inform the contemporary brand communication methods, such as the brand’s representation in social media (e.g., in pinterest). Moreover, the measurement of consumer’s level of CC can allow brand managers and retailers to identify receptive segments and make more efficient resource commitments to VMD. Investment in VMD elements can then be better matched to the anticipated target market to avoid either over- or under spending on it. Sales forecasts can also become more accurate if CC could be assessed and considered along with the employed in-store and digital product presentation methods.

This study examines the effects of consumer beliefs for food certifications on the behavioral intentions and the behavioral intention biases to purchase the certified seafoods by a subjective probability model which is on the basis of the mathematical probability model and the covariance model. The food certifications used on this study are‘Organic foods’,‘Traceability system of food products’and ‘. HACCP’. The representative foods of fishery products on this study is seasoned laver. The current study showed the following results. First, consumers have more than two different beliefs each for all certifications which are the subjects of this study. The beliefs of the certifications have an impact on the consumers when they consider to buy the certified seafood products. Second, consumers try to persuade by themselves to ensure that their particular belief about the certification could lead to a purchase the seafood products. Consumer beliefs of the“environmentally friendly production”on the organic foods certification is an important factor as much as the“guarantee of food safety”belief making a positive purchasing behavior intentions(PBI) bias for the organic seafood products. Consumers also have a positive PBI bias for certified seafood products in all certifications as long as a certification is considered to “guarantee the transparency of the food distribution process”as its belief.‘Traceability system’was the only one which didn’t generate a positive PBI bias from the belief of“guarantee of food safety”out of three certifications.

The motivation behind experiential and material purchases is asymmetric: experiences are more strongly motivated by happiness-seeking and meaning-seeking than materials are. The two motivators mediate the elicited happiness from purchases. Strong happiness or meaning seeking motivation will result in similar levels of happiness for both experiences and materials.

Fast fashion brand marketers should develop marketing strategies that effectively satisfy the values consumers seek when purchasing fast fashion brands. This study aimed to identify the consumption value factors of fast fashion brands and to reveal the value factors that influence attitudes toward purchasing fast fashion brands. Data were gathered by surveying university students in the Seoul metropolitan area using convenience sampling. Three hundred and five questionnaires were used in the statistical analysis, which consisted of exploratory factor analysis using SPSS and confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis using AMOS. The factor analysis revealed the following six value factors: Emotional value, social value, price/value for money, durability value, eco-value, and consistency value. The fit statistic for the six-factor model was quite acceptable. Two of the six value factors, emotional value and price/value for money, positively influenced attitudes toward purchasing fast fashion brands. The overall fits of the revealed model suggested that the model fit the data well. The results suggested that fast fashion marketers need to understand the value factors that motivate consumers to purchase fast fashion brands. In addition, marketers should focus their efforts on satisfying emotional value and price/value for money in order to establish their brands in the increasingly competitive fast fashion industry.

Purpose – Unstable vegetable prices have been one of the major concerns in Korean agricultural and food marketing system. The Korean government has implemented a number of policy instruments, including government purchasing programs in order to alleviate fluctuations in vegetable prices. The economic impact of policy instruments has been assessed based on the average monthly price change rate before and after the implementation of the policy. However, this approach failed to provide a net impact of policy measures on price stabilization in the vegetable markets, as policy impacts could not be successfully distinguished from other effects on price changes in the vegetable market. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the net impact of the government purchasing program on the price volatility of dried red pepper which is considered one of the major vegetables in Korea. Research design, data, and methodology – This study develops a monthly dynamic partial equilibrium model of Korean dried red pepper market. Behavioral equations in the model were estimated by OLS and synthetic method based on the annual and monthly time series data from 1993 to 2015. The model is first simulated to yield actual dried red pepper market conditions in 2015 as a baseline and then compared it to the scenario assuming that there were no government purchases of dried red pepper in 2015. Results - According to the ex-post scenario analysis using the developed model, without the government procurements in 2015, the average monthly price change rate and the value of coefficient of variation of dried red pepper in 2015 would be respectably 7.9 percent and 0.10. It is relatively higher than the actual average monthly price change rate and the value of coefficient of variation of dried red pepper in 2015 which were respectively 1.7 percent and 0.06. Conclusions - The ex-post simulation results in this study shows that if there were no government purchases of dried red pepper in 2015, the dried red pepper market would have had much higher volatile price movements. The results of this study would provide useful information for future price stabilization policy of vegetable markets in Korea.

Purpose – This study explores the role of construal levels in predicting online consumer behavior on a retail website. It builds on the conceptualization that simply browsing a website and making actual purchases can be an outcome of how abstractly or concretely one thinks about that experience. This study examines the differential effects of intermediary websites’ attributes and seller’s product offerings in predicting frequency of visits and actual purchases. Research design, data, and methodology – Data were collected from 188 undergraduate students in a large university of Korea. Hierarchical regression model was utilized to test the proposed effect of website characteristics and seller attributes on visit and purchase. Results – We propose and find that online shopping website visits and purchase frequency have different antecedents. The results reveal that website visit frequency and purchase have different predictors and this can be explained through construal level theory. Specifically, we find purchase frequency is predicted more by website image and financial benefits can be more predictive in actual purchases. Conclusions – Consumer behavior on the internet can be delineated into website visits and actual purchases. First, uplifting the image of the website itself is much more important than just making offerings cheaper. Online shopping website should try to match its features to mental representations that customers go through from just visit (abstract) to purchase (concrete).

구기자 관련종사자들이 구기자의 잠재적 수요를 진작시키게 하는 방법은 첫째, 세계 각지에 생산되는 모든 구기자의 성분을 철저히 분석하고 우리나라에서 생산되는 구기자의 강점을 소비자들에게 투명하게 인식할 수 있어야 한다. 둘째, 구기자 구매자들이 구기자를 구입할 때 어떤 속성을 기준으로 구매하는지도 사전분석을 통해 체계적으로 알고 있어야 하고 구기자 수요를 창출한다는 것은 매우 미시적 대응에 지나지 않는다는 것이다. 셋째, 구기자의 여러 성분 가운데