Transcript
Do you know why your customers are buying from you in the first place?
And that your customers are using dozens of explicit and subtle cues like the design or the price, which guide their purchasing decisions to assess your product.
Do you know how your purchasing decisions are influenced by companies so that you buy from them?
That they use, for example, the anchor method to let prices appear more reasonable even they are not.
More importantly, you can use the same cues and methods at your next farmers market to get more exposure, more impressions, more considerations, and, therefore, more purchases.
Welcome to the deep dive into customer preference, perception, and persuasion.
In today’s video, which is part of a series, I will first define what quality means for your customers.
Then which cues they are generally using and finally, which once they are using to assess the quality of your products and the impact your production has on the environment.
High-quality food can be defined as the requirements necessary to satisfy the needs and expectation of the consumers.
These needs and expectations depend on personal and economic, sociocultural, and marketing factors.
Those factors are, for example, age, gender, education, income, family size, status, purchase intention, promotion, or place, to name just a few.
All these factors combined with the subjective food qualities such as, for example, organic or price and the objective food qualities such as, for example, the chemical, microbiological, and physical attributes of a food product determine your success as a mushroom producer.
To assess the food quality of your product, your potential customers are using dozens of different cues – to be exact, researchers identified 59 of them.
These cues can be divided into those applied during the purchasing act and those used after the purchasing act.
During the purchasing act, your potential customers rely on explicit cues such as color or price and subtle cues such as packaging material or design.
Out of these 59 cues, the top 10 common cues used to make sense of the quality of your products are Packaging material, Smell, Expiration date, Organic label, Freshness, Taste, Origin, Ingredients, Price, Appearance.
While these 10 cues give you an idea of what your potential customers are looking for when it comes to quality, the cues change when assessing the healthiness of your products.
Your potential customers will then, in this case, pay attention to Taste, Smell, Expiration date, Appearance, Origin, Organic label, Freshness, Additives, Nutrition factors, Ingredients.
Besides quality and healthiness, your potential customers will more and more want to know how the production of your food will impact the natural environment.
They, therefore, will use the following cues to get a sense of it.
Resources used, Transport, Ingredients, Generated waste, Organic label, Ethical, Pesticide, Production type, Origin, Packaging.
After they have purchased a product from you, quality factors such as taste, packaging material, storage requirements, and so on will determine their experience of the expected food quality.
If their experience matches their expectation during the purchasing act, they are more likely to buy more often from you.
To better understand your customers, I recommend that the next time you are buying fresh food, you pay a little bit more attention to the cues you are using yourself to assess its quality.
If you want to share your finding with me, I put a poll in the description box.
Talk to you in the next one about the influence of perception.
Before I do, let me thank my Patreons for their ongoing support.
Recommended
Sources
[1] 📝Haas, R.; Imami, D.; Miftari, I.; Ymeri, P.; Grunert, K.; Meixner, O. Consumer Perception of Food Quality and Safety in Western Balkan Countries: Evidence from Albania and Kosovo. Foods 2021, 10, 160. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10010160, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[2] 📝Petrescu, D.C.; Vermeir, I.; Petrescu-Mag, R.M. Consumer Understanding of Food Quality, Healthiness, and Environmental Impact: A Cross-National Perspective. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 169. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17010169, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[3] 📝Rahman, S.M.E.; Mele, M.A.; Lee, Y.-T.; Islam, M.Z. Consumer Preference, Quality, and Safety of Organic and Conventional Fresh Fruits, Vegetables, and Cereals. Foods 2021, 10, 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10010105, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
