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Abstract
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.