Assessment of Customer Satisfaction at Farm Gate Markets

Abstract

This study attempted to gain empirical evidence of attitudes, preferences, and characteristics of consumers who attend farm gate markets, measuring their customer satisfaction. The article aims to explore whether the choice of this particular marketing channel is motivated by an emotional impulse or is the signal of an enduring attitudinal change justified by higher satisfaction with perceived food and service quality. A descriptive analysis of the customers' profiles was obtained with the cluster analysis, and a structural equation model to investigate the relationship between perceived quality and customer satisfaction and loyalty was proposed and tested.

KEYWORDS:

• cluster analysis
• customer satisfaction
• farm gate markets
• loyalty
• perceived quality
• SEM
• service quality

Notes

GlobalGAP-EurepGAP is a common standard for farm management practice created in the late 1990s by several European supermarket chains and their major suppliers. The aim was to bring conformity to different retailers' supplier standards, which had been creating problems for farmers. It is now the world's most widely implemented farm certification scheme and reference for Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). Most European customers for agricultural products now demand evidence of EurepGAP certification as a prerequisite for doing business.

The Likert scale is composed of objects and evaluations: the columns report the object name of the comparative scale for category at one pole (Stapel scale) and the row indicates the level of consensus varying between the two extreme poles.

Standardization is required when the observation (attributes) of the object are measured with different scales.

The K-cluster is used to observe the similarity of clusters; the number of clusters are defined with the criterion of the minimum distance between the Ward centroid and the observation of the change in ESS.

Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, and Tatham (2006) suggested that Cronbach's alpha coefficient over 0.6 is adequate for basic research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Franco Rosa

Franco Rosa is a professor at the University of Udine, economic section of the Department of Food Science. His research interests are addressed to the demand of agricultural products explored with econometric and psychometric models to capture the consumer perceptions and preferences for food and marketing. A second interest is the competitiveness of the agrofood industry using the food chain models and total quality systems.

Federico Nassivera

Federico Nassivera is a research fellow with a PhD in Economics, Ecology, and Preservation of Agricultural and Landscape-Environmental Systems. He is an agronomist and his main areas of research include agro-food marketing, consumer behavior models, event marketing, and management of agro-industrial firms.