ABSTRACT
Consumer concern for animal welfare is currently not fully reflected in the market share of welfare-enhanced meat. A possible solution is developing marketing strategies that emphasize personally relevant benefits such as taste and curiosity, instead of having a sole focus on sustainability-related benefits, since existing research indicates that the former are more appealing to most consumers. This study tests strategies positioning welfare-enhanced meat as personally relevant in a real-life experiment and how consumer attitudes towards eating meat influence reactions to the positioning strategies. The study conducts experimental auctions with 101 Dutch university students, manipulating the positioning strategy and a certified animal welfare label and measuring participants' willingness to pay (WTP) for a lunch meal with chicken meat. Results indicate that all manipulations significantly increase consumer WTP, with higher WTP for certified labels than for the positioning strategy, and the highest WTP for the combination of both elements (without providing evidence for an interaction effect). This implies that companies should combine positioning strategies that emphasize personally relevant benefits with certified labels. Since the effectiveness of such strategies may be limited for consumers with conflicting feelings towards meat, some care should be taken when designing awareness campaigns about the effects of meat consumption.
ABSTRACT
This article presents a conceptual framework that aims to encourage consumer animal-friendly product choice by introducing positioning strategies for animal-friendly products. These strategies reinforce the animal welfare with different types of consumption values and can therefore reduce consumers' social dilemma, which is a major barrier to animal-friendly consumer choices. The article suggests how animal-friendly products can use various types of consumption values (functional, sensory, emotional, social, epistemic and situational) to create an attractive position relative to their competitors. It also explains why some consumer segments, such as those with a specific thinking style, may experience a stronger effect of some strategies, giving directions on how to approach different types of consumers. Finally, building on research asserting that animal welfare is a credence product attribute, the article proposes moderating effects of two factors that help consumers to evaluate the credibility of animal welfare claims, namely corporate social responsibility strategy and the role of stakeholders. Here it concludes that companies selling animal-friendly products need to be aware of the impact of their overall strategy on the effectiveness of positioning strategies for individual products and that, to gain consumer trust, they may need to collaborate with relevant stakeholders, such as media or animal-interest organizations.
