Splitting consumer's willingness to pay premium price for organic products over main purchase motivations

Recently, Italian agriculture has been widely characterised by the increasing number of farms and land converting to organic farming. In the slow process of shifting from a "niche" to a broader consumption in the organic products market deep differences between conventional and organic production, distribution and consumption became evident. In such a context, the consumer's behaviour about organic products analysis transpires to be complex as it involves either social - economic and psychographic characteristics. In order to address this issue a research has been carried out in two steps: in the first one, a qualitative analysis step, 45 consumer s of organic products were interviewed by phone using laddering techniques; then, in the second quantitative step, data from a 203 consumer s sample, representative of a region of South of Italy, was analysed by means of a multinomial logit. The research main innovative aspect resides in the two- step approach (qualitative - quantitative analysis), that enabled researchers to identify and quantify the environmental and hygienic component importance in consumer preferences on organic products.