Abstract
As previous research stated, customers frequently behave differently than they claim to. This phenomenon, called the attitude-behavior gap (ABG), can lead to significant discrepancies between purchase decisions and actual attitudes. Therefore, considering the ABG is crucial for retailers and brand managers. Even though an increasing relevance of both online grocery shopping (OGS) and organic products, there is still no research on how the ABG differs between also-online and offline-only consumers. Addressing this research gap, we compare average ABGs of customers who purchase exclusively offline with that of customers who purchase both online and offline. We use extensive data that includes both purchases and attitudes from an average of 25,620 households from 2016 to 2020. We find that also-online consumers have wider discrepancies between their attitudes and purchases compared to offline-only consumers. We conclude that these new insights of the ABG for organic products are highly relevant for brand managers and retailers both online and offline.
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Notes
- 1.
The attitude towards organic products was measured using a Likert scale from 1 to 5. Normalization to values between 0 and 1 resulted in the following values: 0.00, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1.00.
- 2.
The source of the data is GfK Consumer Panels & Services.
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Ermecke, K., Olbrich, R., Brüggemann, P. (2023). They Don’t Do What They Say – The Attitude-Behavior Gap in Online and Offline Grocery Shopping for Organic Products. In: Martínez-López, F.J. (eds) Advances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce. DMEC 2023. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31836-8_9
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