Building Individual Brands with Place-of-Origin Information: Implications for the Food Industry

Growing segments of world consumers seek better quality, healthiness and larger variety in their food consumption (Verbeke, 2005; IDDBA, 2008). As part of this process, consumers’ attention for place-of-origin (POO) attributes as part of the demand of agri-food products is increasing (Grunert, 2005). The major dimension of POO attributes that have been studied in agricultural economics and marketing literature since the 1960s is country-of-origin (Dichter, 1962; Schooler, 1965; Peterson and Jolibert, 1995; Verlegh and Steenkamp, 1999; Balabanis and Diamantopoulos, 2004; Loureiro and Umberger, 2005; Ehmke et al., 2008) while in the last decade region-of-origin attributes have been studied separately, in relation with consumers’ values for tradition and authenticity of agri-food products (Kuznesof et al., 1997; Tregear et al., 1998; Van der Lans et al., 2001; Van Ittersum and Candel, 2001; Van Ittersum et al., 2001; Scarpa et al., 2005).