Fresh From the Source: Analyzing Consumer Attitudes Towards Locally Sourced Groceries

and so with that I am excited to introduce Dr Marcus kuna he is a professor of business from the Department of marketing and the program director for the MMR research program at ug he has joined with a few MMR candidates Josie Hannah will Anna and Kayla and they will be discussing a fresh from The Source analyzing consumer attitudes towards locally sourced grocery um so with that thank you so much for your time excited for this presentation I'm going to stop sharing I'm going to go off camera and on mute I'll be around to help build questions after you all are done and thanks so much thank you just making sure our audio is working it is yes okay sounds good and can you see our screen now yes we can see it ohol all right uh big thank you to uh Chris and Bill who have given our students this opportunity to present you know give them get their feet wet into the world of conference as they're finishing up their MMR uh degree uh for those of you who are not familiar with the MMR program it's the master of marketing research is the first and uh program of this nature that over 40 years ago and we have graduated many many leaders in the industry so if you you or um anybody who know is recruiting uh top talent in consumer insight and marketing research I'll suggest that you contact us at this uh email here so just to give a little introduction this students um this presentation today was part of um the final project that the students presented in my uh course last fall so with that I would like to invite the students to uh present hi everyone thank you for coming today so like they said we are candidates here in the MMR program at the University of Georgia and we're excited to show you our recent study on consumers attitudes towards locally sourced groceries so just to quickly run through our agenda we'll start out with the background overview and methodology then we'll move into our executive summary and key findings and then finally we'll wrap things up with our recommendations limitations and future research so to give you a little background on how we came up with the idea for this study so we read Mel's 2023 report on grocery retailing in the US and from this we picked out three key facts that we thought were interesting and relevant to the study so first is that shopping local is often perceived to benefit consumers and the community as a whole next is that Comm consumers are eager to support causes that are important to them and then finally curated displays of locally sourc products can drive impulse purchases and then to the right here you can see there is a quote from Beth Bloom who is a food and drink Analyst at mtel and she's basically just talking about how a lot of consumers that buy local products do so for that increased freshness and to also support the local economy and that these Shoppers are willing to sacrifice cost savings to achieve those benefits all right thank you Hannah so following the secondary research we came up with three objectives regarding uh locally sourced groceries the first objective was to test the effect package labeling had on purchasing intent of the locally sourced groceries our second objective was to more broadly identify consumer attitudes toward locally sourced groceries and then our third and final objective was to determine where people go to find their locally sourced groceries so a hypothesis we came up with um and decided to test was grocery products that include a locally Source sticker will have a higher average purchase intent score when compared to products that do not include the locally Source sticker across eight products that we chose and so getting into how we conducted the survey so we had a sample size of 400 using aytm to survey people through an online survey format um if you have not heard of aytm is it a platform that and aym stands for ask your target market aam is a survey building platform somewhat similar um in functionality to qualtrix it also has an online panel function built into the platform which qualter is not we also wanted to note that we had a person on staff with aytm who helped us quality control the survey as well so we screened respondents um as a prea qualification measure to make sure they were either the primary Shopper or at least shared some sort of grocery shopping responsibilities within a household um anyone else was kicked out in the middle here we also have the gender breakdown wanted to note that it was roughly split 5050 um and then we lastly we made sure anyone surveyed was over the age of 21 due to their beer being one of the products that we wanted to test and then the the last note on this slide is that we also had um a representative from aym balance out our age range quotas so that we didn't skew too old and aym was really great at helping us with quotas in this survey and many others We performed so just wanted to shout out them for uh great work there so here we're going to get into the methodology so we decided to perform AB testing as many of you many of you may already know AB testing uses a control group versus a test group where all participants are split into either you know one group or the other um one group was shown the products with no locally Source sticker that being the control group and the other group the test group was shown the products with the locally Source sticker um in the middle here we uh we decided to capture consumer attitudes through the use of lyer scales and then we also aimed to gauge where and how frequently participants find locally sourced groceries oh apologies there so to give you all an idea of what the AB testing portion of the survey was like for the participants we asked participants to imagine they were heading to the grocery store for a typical grocery shopping trip we told them you will be shown u a set of pictures grocery items you will be able to rate How likely or willing you are to purchase these items so I just wanted to note that you know they're not shown both these image they're only each group you know half the respondents are only shown one set of images with or without the sticker um and you know once we showed them that product we would ask them to please indicate how willing you are to purchase these products in a scale of one to seven one being not likely to purchase seven being extremely likely to purchase so you know in that AB testing we then take the control group and compare it to the test group results overall um really just wanted to see if there is a statistical significant difference in Pur in between the groups or to State it maybe more simply we really we we wanted to see if the locally Source sticker caused the product to perform better than the product without the sticker so here you can see eight products that we included in the AB testing um for purchase intent we did want to knowe both peanut butter and potato chips uh we did not imagine to be viewed as traditionally more processed and other products but we wanted to include them anyway just to have something a little bit different um it is worth noting that those surveyed were shown much larger versions of these products that took up an entire screen so we we do believe that the sticker was was quite prominent for the participants great thank you will and now we're going to get into our executive summary which is just an overview of the recommendations that we made based off of our results so first we recommend that grocery stores create inore displays for these lowly Source Products so that their Shoppers can find them more easily next recommend that farmers markets emphasize the proximity of their goods so that the people buying these products know that they are supporting people in their local community and finally we recommend that marketers use prominent labeling on their products so that people know that these are locally s sourced goods and that they are benefiting the people in the community around them and now getting into the results of our AB test so like will said earlier we showed all the participants eight different products and asked them a purchase intent question for each of the products with one being extremely unlikely to purchase and seven meaning extremely likely to purchase and then we compared the average purchase intense scores between the control and the test group to see if there was any difference with the presence of the locally Source sticker and we found that overall there was no significant difference found in the average purchase and tense scores between the control and the test group so this indicates that the locally Source sticker did not impact purchase intent and next we looked at kind of the breakdown for the eight different products and compared the purchase intense scores between the control and the test groups for those eight different products and we found that only one of the products had a significant difference between the test and the control group which was peanut butter so the average purchase intense score for peanut butter was significantly higher for the control group and as you can see on the chart on the left 27% of those in the control group were extremely likely to purchase peanut butter while only 10.5 5% of those in the test group were extremely likely to purchase peanut butter so people liked it without the locally Source sticker more and then later in the survey we asked a question about how often people are purchasing these locally sourced groceries and we use that to divide them into two different groups a high purchase frequency group and a low purchase frequency group so those who said they always or often purchase locally sourced groceries they were put into the high frequency group and then those that said they only occasionally rarely or never purchase these groceries they were put in the low purchase frequency group and then for those two separate groups we looked at the purchase intense scores between the control and the test group and compared those and overall we found that there was no difference in the average purchase intense scores between the control and test group for both high and low purchase frequency groups and then we looked at it across the eight products again for those two separate groups and for those in the High purchase frequency group there were no significant differences between the control and test group for any of the products and then for those that have a lower purchase frequency we found that both peanut butter and bread had a significant difference and the control group was significantly higher on their average purchase and tense scores compared to the test group so infrequent purchasers were less likely to buy locally sourced peanut butter and bread and so overall from our AB test we found that the presence of having a locally Source sticker on a product did not lead to higher purchase intent so that led us to reject our hypothesis that will mentioned earlier thank you Anna so next we wanted to look at um consumers attitudes towards locally Source groceries and if that related to their purchase intent so in order to do so we asked um six attitudinal questions spanding from I like local Source groceries um I find locally Source groceries rarely available I believe locally Source are good for the Community I'm willing to pay more for locally Source I trust that there it is local to the community and then I feel proud when I buy or use local Source groceries so in order to gauge consumers attitudes on this we used um a seven-point Liker skill and had respondents right from one to seven one being strongly disagree and seven being strongly agree for each of the following statements so as you can see here um we found that majority of respondents um seem to like LLY Source groceries and believe they're good for Community they trust their local to the community and they feel proud when they buy or use local Source groceries so looking at these different attitudes we really want to hone in on three of these percentages being the small percentage of consumers that were willing to pay more for locally source that large percentage of consumers that believed they're good for the community and then that kind of middle percentage which was the 51% of consumers that agreed that they found lcly Source readily available so looking at this chart here um we were looking at the 44% of consumers that were willing to pay more for locally sourc groceries we found 28% of overall respondents disagreed with this statement and we really found that this relates to their purchase Behavior so as you can see in this chart um on one side we can see those consumers that were willing to pay more and on the other we see the consumers that were not willing to pay more and the charts are almost inverses of each other with 44% of consumers who um always are often purchased locally stores falling into that group of respondents who are willing to pay more then on the flip side only 10% of consumers that are not willing to pay more always are often purchased locally sourced and we also kind of see that you know really flipping percentages with those consumers that never or really purchased loly Source groceries so we can really conclude here that you know your willingness to pay for locally source is going to match up to how often you purchase locally Source groceries as if you are willing to pay for local Source you are going to purchase it so then looking at that um large percentage of where respondents who agreed locally Source groceries are good for the community we did find though that even though these respondents had this positive view of locally Source groceries this did not necessarily mean that they purchased locally sourced a lot so as you can see here our largest um within that percent the largest percent of consumers only occasionally purchase locally Source groceries at 47% and only 32% of these respondents always are often purchased locally source so having this positive view did not necessarily lead to increased es then lastly looking at that kind of middle percent of respondents that agreed that they found locally sourced readily available we had 26 um percent of respondents disagree with the statement and the charts are very similar and like inverses of each other kind of like our first um looking at those consumers are willing to pay more with the um higher percent of consumers who found local Source readily available always are of often purchasing locally sourced at 47% and only 7% of those consumers is never a rarely purchased locally Source but then on the other side um out of the consumers that did not find it readily available only 8% always or often purchase locally source and 52% never really purchase so it just really shows that if consumers um found locally Source readily available they were more likely to purchase rather than those that didn't find it readily available thanks so much Kayla and kind of talking about finding these locally sourced products we asked respondents whether or not they actively sought out locally sourced products and only 35.3% of our respondents said that they actively sought them out while a majority of respondents 64.7% said that they did not actively seek out locally sourc products which moving into our next slide has an impact on where these locally sourced products are found by respondents so as you can see from a more low effort location such as grocery store displays where locally Source Products are more readily visible to respondents there's very little difference between these two groups those that actively seek out versus those that do not actively seek out with only a difference of 1.9% of finding locally Source Products in this location however when you move into a more High effort in-person location which we consider to be locations where locally Source Products are less readily visible to people you can see that difference between these two groups increase drama atically so in locally sourc product sections you can see the percentages for both of these groups finding locally sourced products in this location dip however you can see the does not actively seek at liqu source product groups dip dramatically while actively seeking out group only dips a little bit and then moving into farmers markets which we still consider to be a more High effort location um those percentages increase for both groups however you can still see a bigger gap between these two groups with 19.4% difference however farmers markets we did consider to be a different location than product sections and grocery stores because product sections and grocery stores are expected to have a mix of both Mass distribution products and locally sourced products however farmers markets are anticipated to be mainly if not all locally sourced products and then moving into our digital locations such as social media and internet searches you can see the percentage of people in both groups finding locally Source Products in these locations Dro dramatically especially with those that do not actively seek out locally sourced products because we consider digital locations to be more High effort because typically a user would have to actively search out these products in the first place even for social media to come up on an algorithm naturally and then moving to Hannah we move into our recommendations great thank you Josie so we identified three key stakeholders and created some recommendations for each of them so beginning with grocery stores as we touched on earlier a lot of consumers are interested in buying locally sourced products however many of our respondents noted feelings though these products are difficult to find so that led to our first recommendation which is that grocery stores should create inore displays to streamline access to and Elevate the visibility of locally sourced products our next recommendation is for farmers markets so according to the USDA locally sourced Goods can actually be produced from up to 400 miles away but in our study we found that most consumers proceed them to only be from Zer to 100 miles away so we think that farmers markets should emphasize the proximity of their goods to highlight the Clos production to Consumers compared to grocery store products and then finally for marketers like we mentioned earlier a lot of people do associate buying locally sourc products with those Feelgood emotions and believing that they're good for the community so we recommend marketers to utilize prominent labeling and alistic marketing messages to tap into consumers perceptions of locally sourced Goods benefiting the community now just to touch on some of our limitations for the study so we did only include respondents that were at least 21 years of age and this was intentional because we included deer as one of the products in our survey however it does mean that we missed out on collecting responses from younger consumers that could still have some valuable opinions next we only included respondents that identified themselves as either a primary Shopper or someone that shared the responsibility of grocery shopping for their household so we couldn't collect responses from everyone that just grocery shops occasionally that still might be interested in locally Source Products or have some good feedback there then we only we did not include an attention check in the study so we can not be sure that everyone was paying attention so some people in the test group may not have noticed the locally sourc label on the products that they were shown and then finally just our limited time and budget we did have a certain set of time to complete this project however we think with more time and money we would be able to dive deeper into this study as well as some of the future research questions that Josie is about to touch on thanks Hannah so as Hannah mentioned if we had more time we would love to dive into some different topics relating to locally sourced products and how they are marketed to individuals with the first being how the addition of a location to locally Source label effects purchase intent we only used a sticker that marked that it was locally sourced but we did not include a specific location such as Athens Georgia and we would want to see how the addition of a certain mileage such as 50 miles from where they are or a certain city would affect purchase intent for that specific product and subsequent purchased Behavior the second one we would want to research is how the presentation of locally Source items in a grocery store display facilitates purchases we'd like to see how the specific display the height of it and the different marketing tools surrounding it as well as the location in the grocery store would affect the purchase intent of specific products and subsequent purchase Behavior as well and then finally we would like to see how time spent grocery shopping affects the purchase Behavior and the purchase intent of locally sourced products we wanted to see whether or not high levels of grocery store shopping and high time spent in a grocery store could either increase or decrease the purchase intent to locally sourced products and with that that leads us to the end of our presentation we want to give a special thank you to excellant research for allowing us to present this topic that's very exciting to us and we want to give a special shout out to aym for helping out with our survey and being a resource for us not only in this project but throughout the program and then finally we want to thank everyone who watched our presentation today um it's been absolutely exhilarating to be able to present to y'all really important research to us and we want to thank you just once again so now we will open it up to any questions that we'd love to answer for you thank you so much I don't see any questions in the chat right now so as people are thinking up some questions one thing that I would like to ask is what you learned along the way throughout this research and what you would do differently and this can be an individual answer or each of you can respond sure I can definitely start out I think one of the main things that I learned personally throughout this project was the ability to Pivot um at first we didn't necessarily know the direction of how we wanted to take the locally testing locally sourced labeling and after bouncing off a couple of ideas we decide to do ab testing as the best form and when we our survey we thought oh this is going to be great locally Source Products are definitely going to have a higher purchase intent and then coming to the end we actually realized that our results showed the opposite and so in asking other questions in our survey we were able to Pivot those results and come up with new recommendations based off of those which was very exciting because that is how a lot of research is going to be it's not going to be exactly cookie cutter perfect results and the ability to shift that and still come up with actionable recommendations was a very important tool that I will definitely carry on in my professional career um and yeah along with that I mean that was a big thing that I think all of us learn from this project also just going through the motions of conducting an AB test was really big for me because we talked about it in classes but never actually performed one so we had to go through all the steps of figuring out how to actually program that into a TM into our survey and then once we got the results we just kind of stared at them because we were like we don't really know how to test this and then Marcus was very helpful and kind of guided us through the process of analyzing our results and kind of interpreting what we got from them which is very helpful for me and now I know how to interpret and analyze an AB test which is something I'm definitely going to use in the rest of my career I agree with uh all that was said I think one really practical takeaway for me in addition to that is that if I were you know next time say I do AB testing um I think I might have gotten a little bit more qualitative feedback on how things were presented just from people who had no uh you know weren't related to our how you know design process at all didn't know anything about it just say hey can you look at this tell us what you think like we think the stickers were good but they might have had a different opinion and said oh I didn't realize the sticker was on there I don't think that would have been the case but the point is we probably would have gotten more feedback just to improve the overall efficacy of the survey and that's that's all we have for that question okay I did receive a question in the chat Lori would like to know if you ran this test at a Whole Foods Market in person how would you guess the results might be different interesting question does anyone have anything that immediately comes to mind I definitely think if we ran it at Whole Foods we would see kind of a higher um consumer attitude like perspective of this survey I think a lot of people would have that higher purchase intent but also have a higher view on local Source groceries as a lot of their platform I feel like is around having kind of that fresh like locally source so I definitely think the results would differ and we might also see more significant results in the purchase intent or if someone else wants to touch on that too but I definitely think it would really affect our consumer attitudes portion of our study yeah and in addition to that too I think the I would just guess and who knows if the results would bear this out The Shopper might be just overall more conscious of what they're buying where it's from and how it might affect the community just because you know everyone in their mother shops at more normal stores but you know Whole Foods and more specialty stores maybe you get a consumer that looks into how they're shopping more maybe you get a more um a different tier of consumer if you want to put it that way and that is actually something that I would do differently with this survey would definitely break our results down by where consumers shopped I think that has a big um effect on how people shop and their attitudes towards grocery shopping in general I also think that our question of we made a choice to um exclude anybody who was not the primary grocery Shopper or at least shared the grocery shopping experience but I would definitely like to see the addition of people who didn't necessarily have the majority share of grocery shopping and see their different opinions and where they shopped because that definitely has an effect on whether or not you decide to purchase locally sourced or mass distribution and it also determines which products fall into either category and which products are important thanks well I don't see any other questions I do have a note of feedback that just says that you all did a great job that note is from Jessica thank you so much for your time thank you for presenting to us we enjoyed hearing your experience and learning about what you would do differently and so with that I will let you all say your final remarks and then we will get ready for our next presenter once again a big thank you to Christen B and accelerant who have allowed our students to have this experience for prob like for four years now it's such a great experience uh for them so I hope uh you know just like I think was Jessica said that you agree uh that you know we're producing very high quality students here and that um I hope if you have a needs now or in the future that you look into the MMR program to recruit from or or if you know somebody who's interested in this career and want to apply to the MMR program please uh let us um let us know and send them uh our way thank you very much and I'll see you next time