Increasing Sales by Promoting the Attributes of Pecan through a Systematic Science-Based Marketing Strategy

Promoting health benefits and the taste of pecans could effectively increase purchase intention and willingness to pay (Robinson, 2020). However, a consumer generally faces tradeoffs between the healthiness and tastiness of food, which are linked to neurobiological processes underpinning food choice and control of eating behaviors (Lowe and Butryn, 2007). Taste, in particular, can be an essential demand determinant; however, it can contradict a person’s need for a healthy diet (Lowe and Butryn, 2007), especially among consumers of value-added products (Campbell and Shonkwiler, 2020). At the same time, health information could serve as a cue for low taste and high price (Jo and Lusk, 2018). Communicating the appropriate marketing information is essential for increasing producer and consumer welfare. That is, highlighting the “appropriate” attributes of foods may decrease the perceived tension between taste and health or clarify the common lay belief that “unhealthy food has a better taste.” The main goal is to quantify the potential economic benefits for producers and consumers of promoting evidence-based health benefits and taste-related attributes of pecans using two similar non-hypothetical incentive-compative elicitation methods. The results of our study will serve as a basis to (1) identify promotion and marketing practices in the pecan industry, which will have the potential to be expanded to the entire specialty crop industry, (2) determine whether experts have accurate information on consumers preferences, and (3) provide a better understanding of the role of elicitation methods on consumer and producer valuation