Grunert's Total Food Quality Model and Food Industry Firms - Case Study Example

Running Head: GRUNERT'S TOTAL FOOD QUALITY (TFQ) MODEL AID FOOD To What Extent Can Grunert's Total Food Quality (TFQ) Model Aid Food IndustryFirms In Devising Appropriate Marketing Strategies [Writer's Name] [Name of Institution] To What Extent Can Grunert's Total Food Quality (TFQ) Model Aid Food Industry Firms In Devising Appropriate Marketing Strategies Several attempts have been made to consumers' perspicacity of food that have facilitated or prohibited the food choice, consumer attitudes and incentives for purchase/non-purchase (Grunert and Juhl, 1995) for UK food firms in designing marketing strategies. According to subsist research, organic food is identified as food without 'chemicals' and 'growth hormones', that is 'not severely' produced and is grown as "unsophisticated". People buy food mainly for health motives; in sight of being best for their children because of lesser pesticides and manure residues. Furthermore, very well taste being free from Bovine Spongiform Enciphalopathy, genetic amendment and food additives are incentives for buying food. According to the Grunert's Total Food Quality Model the propensity towards augmented consumption of food can be correlated to a broader concern as regard to environmental issues. The major reasons that thwart consumers from purchasing food are: high price, be deficient in availability, gratification with conventional food, lack of reliance, the inadequate choice and paucity of perceived value. Although a number of consumers have shown curiosity in food, the food options of comparatively few people have been affected. Hence, expressed curiosity in food does not play a momentous role in food purchase and a disparity between positive attitude and behaviour is evident. Thus, acquaintance of consumers' cognitive structures and their impact on the purchase decision will indeed shed light on consumers' food purchases verdict that facilitates UK food firms in devising their marketing strategies. Economic theory has shown some confine in explaining the intricacy and multidimensionality of consumer activities. These bounds not only relate to the supposition of consumer rationality (that is utility exploiting behaviour) and flawless information. The majority of economic models use relative prices and disposable income or budget as illustrative variables of consumer deeds and treat every other sway (for instance social, economic and cultural factors) as cloaked or latent variables: quality inspection is one of them. The analysis of Grunert's Total Food Quality Model guides United Kingdom food firms devising marketing strategies that how consumer attitude deals primarily with predilections and how predilections are formed in the mind of the consumer. Marketing approaches to consumer attitude may be eminent as cognitive versus behavioural. According to Grunert the cognitive approaches underscore constructs dealing with cerebral structures and thinking processes; behavioural approaches stress upon direct links among the characteristics of the environment and behaviour. Both approaches are broadly accepted and accredited ways of analysing behaviour, with a high degree of complement. In this analysis one will ponder on the first approach and concentrate on consumer product knowledge, engagement and eagerness in the case of organic products. From a cognitive perspective, one can define consumer behaviour as the activities that people engross in when deciding, purchasing, and using goods and services to gratify desires. Such activities involve cerebral and emotional processes, besides physical actions. The cognitive approach is based on consumer acquaintance, product perception and the desires consumers want to gratify. Cognition is referred to as the dynamic cerebral constructs and processes involved in thinking, discerning and interpreting stimuli and events from the environment. It includes the information, sense and values that consumers have developed from their practice and stored in their memories. Whilst several aspects of cognition are sentient thinking processes, others are fundamentally automatic. In other words, consumer behaviour doesn't signify only reasoned action but it is effectively a consequence of consumption-relevant cognitive configuration (Grunert, et. al, 1996). When a stimulus or event relating to a product, counting new product information, comes in relation with consumer self-knowledge and his remembrance, a connection between him and the product is erected. A network of links between product attributes, personal consequences and ethics can be exposed to give deeper discernment into consumer motivation. These links develop those elements of the cognitive network that the consumer raises in his intellect when presented with product information in the form of product attributes: when this network is structured in a hierarchical form. The means-end strategy recommends that clientele consider about product description or traits in terms of own cost. These may be ostensible as optimistic or pessimistic. You can say that, the means-end sequence model provides the opportunity to unequivocally relate consumers' desires and product qualities, and divulge his incentives in procuring a product. In Grunert's Total Food Quality Model user decision building is measured like a pinpointing procedure. Consumers put forth comportment, as a way to achieve an aim or conclusion. Moreover, customers also observe most product characteristics as a source to some result: at the conscious level this can be signified by some constructive consequences, at a more conceptual and involuntary stage their climax is to accomplish a standard, that is selected end states of being and selected modes of conduct. To comprehend why consumers are attracted in acquiring a product, it is required to realize the background of this "finalised decisional process" and, hence, of what they need or strive to accomplish by means of procure. The concrete incentives of product utilization can barely be found by just soliciting clearly to the purchaser "Why" as in majority of cases he is not conscious of his conclusion-building process, neither he is capable openly to expose his personal justification for acquisition. Though, Total Food Quality Model study is a practical instrument to effectively attain this logic. Determining the Grunert's Total Food Quality Model is a chronological process that comprises of three steps: 1. Extraction of product distinctions that are mainly related to the purchaser; 2. An in-detail discussion process named laddering, proposed to make known how the users acquaintances product features to values and expenditures; 3. The foundation of hierarchical value maps (HVM), illustrating the cumulative customer means-end-chains as articulated in the ladders, i.e. the association system of values, characteristics and charges. Initially, to extort customer pertinent item qualities, clear-cut drawing out was used (free- cataloguing, triadic taxonomy, grading, etc.). Next, a certain amount of most imperative product characteristics were reserved for knowledge acquisition. Consumers were requested to put up their means-end hierarchy by just reiterating a straightforward query: What's important to you in this product By this approach the consulter fasten up associations among a range of components of the series and consumers were focused to construct their individual cycle of quality-cost-standard. The growth of this type of practice permits the consumer to obviously expose his explanations, those appealing him to select and that else it would not be done to getting back to the radiance from the past. The procedure has, in real, the benefit to make the customer to return and explain about quality-cost-standard affairs. Multiple laddering techniques are described: A system where the natural flow of words of the reactant is controlled as modest as possible, as in a confronting each other is termed as "soft" laddering; "hard" laddering is defined as questionnaire and data gathering procedure where the reactant is forced to construct hierarchy separately, and to give reply at an escalating altitude of thought (Grunert, et. al, 1996). In above two cases, at the end of the process, every user composes single or multiple ladders linking his incentives to a product's characteristics and to their prices, unless ensuing in exposing values related to his preferences. Consequently, incentives related to consumer are interpreted in portions of meaning and then ciphered in classification of attributes-consequences-values. The advance stage is to figure out the so-called implication model - a square template with a range reflecting the amount of elements an individual is attempting to plot - that notifies the rate of the associations between particular classes of elements, consequences and values. Square template (matrix) is the root to build single or multiple HVMs. In the Grunert's Total Food Quality Model, acquaintances and associations are much essential than distinct elements - attributes, benefits and principles - of the string. Associations between particular levels of thought - from the most tangible (attributes) to the most elusive (values) - can describe the power of motivations. By screening at HVMs it is likely to ascertain what persuades customers to pick a product comparatively something else. The model presents a deep analysis into customer acuity, revealing characteristics the consumer judge more important in their variety and relating them into a form of chronological motivations. In this representation, product's attributes are ways by which an end user can get benefit in order to achieve his own objective; or they catch up their own goals, by the use of those products' characteristics they notice as being central and constructing proper consequences to convince their individual values. This statistics is elementary for designing marketing strategies for the product, as well as setting up valuable communication policies. The devising appropriate marketing strategies for UK food firms includes costs associated with processing, wholesaling, distributing, and retailing of foods produced by UK farmers and eaten by UK consumers. It is the dissimilarity between the worth farmers receive for the food and the amount consumers use on food for utilization at and away from home. According to the Grunert's total food quality model the devising appropriate marketing strategies for UK food firms exclude expenditures for imported foods and sea foods. There are numerous major factors underlying the growth in marketing costs. These comprise higher prices of marketing inputs, superior volume of food bought by consumers, a higher percentage of food traded through restaurants and fast food outlets, and more value-added processing and packaging. Labor costs overshadow all other costs in the devising appropriate marketing strategies for British food firms. Increasing labour costs have accounted for approximately half the raise over the last five years and were the main cause factor for the increase in 2001. Although labor costs grew almost 5.95 percent to pound 163 billion, this was below 2000's increase, as employment and wages rose at a slower pace. On the other hand, this raise was almost equal to the average annual rise of the past 5 years. Packaging is the second-largest component of the devising appropriate marketing strategies for British food firms, accounting for 8.5 percent of the food dollar. Serving to grasp packaging expenditures was a 1.75 percent fall in the cost of paper boxes. Prices for paper products are the prime constituent of wrapping costs. The price of linerboard, the major paper box input, fell as producers discounted prices to reduce unnecessary inventories resulting from slow sales. Plastic prices were also lower. According to the Grunert's total food quality model the devising appropriate marketing strategies for UK food firms the aggregate profit margins are larger for food industry firms in the UK due to modest product price increases, lower farm commodity costs, and modest increases in production and marketing costs. Moreover, rationalized food processing processes increased worker efficiency, allowing manufacturers to hold down labor costs. Food industry firms in the UK sustained to attain greater efficiencies through the use of technology for inventory management and merchandising. Retail merchants control labor costs, their principal operating expenditure, by using checkout scanners and computer programs that help in labor arrangement. Bibliography Grunert, K.G., Grunert, S.C. (1993), "A comparative analysis of the influence of economic culture on East and West German consumers' subjective product meaning", The Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus. MAPP working paper no. 15. Grunert, K.G., Baadsgaard, A., Larsen, H.H. Madsen, T.K. (1996), Market Orientation in Food and Agriculture, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Read More