Culture and communication for a wellbeing-oriented food marketing strategy

Altering current food consumption patterns is one of the greatest society challenges in the quest for countervail individual (e.g. obesity; Witkowski, 2007) or societal (e.g., environmental degradation; Sitarz, 1994) problems. Most marketing studies concerning this topic have either focused on individual consumers decision making (Lee et al., 2010), or on the macro-structural level factor that could shape such decision-making process (Thøgersen, 2010), separately. This study aims to link these two levels by analyzing how individuals’ macro-cultural factors can affect a consumer’s individual micro-hedonic and sensory ones, and thus, the intention to consume a particular product. To better understand how culture and marketing framing can influence consumers’ hedonic and sensory food perceptions, we started by hypothesizing that a cultural traditional food product can be perceived differently between local vs foreign consumers, and this is based on their cultural differences and/or knowledge on the local product/culture itself (H1. Local consumers hold hedonic and sensory aspects of a local/traditional snack in higher regard, when compared to foreigners). In this study, we also asked ourselves how marketing communication can frame a consumers’ hedonic and sensory perception on traditional food product, according to individual's cultural value system (H2. A well-informed local consumer hold the same local/traditional product in higher regard, when compared to a not so well-informed – but similar type of – local consumer). In summary, we believe that both hypotheses combined prove that, a generally well-informed consumer will have a more guided, less uncertain and, therefore, a better food experience.