Food and Agricultural Marketing Policy Section Track Sessions

The purpose of this session is to examine the role of non-price marketing strategies employed by firms in the food industry. While the primary intention of marketing is to facilitate exchange between buyers and sellers, this session will focus on the impact food marketing has on the subsequent nutritional quality of consumer food purchases. This session encourages important discussion of the impact of food marketing strategies on consumers’ diet. Given the current obesity crisis and proposals for regulating industry marketing practices, this is a particularly timely topic.

This session includes four presentations with a focus on wine marketing and policy. All four papers discuss implications for the wine industry. The first paper considers how consumers respond to information about appellations for wine from emerging production regions. The authors use auction data that uses three treatments to disentangle the effects of information related to domestic appellations and to more established appellations in Europe. The second paper examines how customer satisfaction in wineries' tasting rooms in the Finger Lakes region in New York impacts sales. The third paper estimates willingness to pay for wines with reduced SO2 content and investigates whether sulfite reduction represent a viable differentiation strategy in wine markets. The fourth paper explores the operation of U.S. drawbacks of import duties and excise taxes for wine by examining wine imports and exports and the patterns of import and export prices.

This joint track session focuses on analyzing the impacts of the food environment on consumer preferences. Given that organic foods transition from niche products to mainstream goods, two presentations address the effects of changing the food context in the organic market. Furthermore, two presentations determine food demand impacts via limiting access to certain foods or providing food labels.

In highly competitive meat markets it is important to understand which attributes are especially valued by consumers. This track session will contribute to a better understanding of consumer preferences for value added meats across different countries and simultaneously address different stages of the food chain by acknowledging factors such as breeding, forage (fat content), meat cuts as well as product labeling and packaging. All papers present current empirical studies from countries such as the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy and Australia.