Bardellos, Marcia Dutra (author), Pedrozo, Eugenio Avila (author), and Van der Lans, Ivo. (author)
Format:
Book chapter
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
International
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: C29803
Notes:
Pages 127-145 in Adam Lindgreen and Martin K. Hingley (eds.), The new cultures of food: marketing opportunities from ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. Gower Publishing Limited, Surrey, England. 319 pages.
10 pages, Enormous quantities of data are generated through social and online media in the era of Web 2.0. Understanding consumer perceptions or demand efficiently and cost effectively remains a focus for economists, retailer/consumer sciences, and production industries. Most of the efforts to understand demand for food products rely on reports of past market performance along with survey data. Given the movement of content-generation online to lay users via social media, the potential to capture market-influencing shifts in sentiment exists in online data. This analysis presents a novel approach to studying consumer perceptions of production system attributes using eggs and laying hen housing, which have received significant attention in recent years. The housing systems cage-free and free-range had the greatest number of online hits in the searches conducted, compared with the other laying hen housing types. Less online discussion surrounded enriched cages, which were found by other methods/researchers to meet many key consumer preferences. These results, in conjunction with insights into net sentiment and words associated with different laying hen housing in online and social media, exemplify how social media listening may complement traditional methods to inform decision-makers regarding agribusiness marketing, food systems, management, and regulation. Employing web-derived data for decision-making within agrifood firms offers the opportunity for actionable insights tailored to individual businesses or products.
