br Traceability quality and labelling foundations and previo

Traceability, quality and labelling: foundations and previous research
Methodology To find the answers to the questions we have referred to different sources of information. We differentiate between two sources of information: sources of primary information and sources of secondary information. Within the sources of secondary information, we have selected relevant preliminary studies with regard to traceability and labelling of food or fish products. Main contributions of these studies have been explained in a previous section. This study has also used primary information, developing a questionnaire entitled “Questionnaire of labelling and traceability of fish products”. This questionnaire has been built based on contributions of previous studies focused on traceability (see Table 1) and from the point of view of experts. The questionnaire is divided into five blocks. The first block focuses on analysing the expected benefits from traceability. The second block deals with the signalling of traceability information on the labelling. The third section deals with the willingness to pay a premium for the introduction of a traceability system. The fourth block covers the quality attributes and asks the interviewee to give their level of agreement or disagreement with each item. Lastly, the final section analyses the socio-demographic profile of the consumer. This section therefore analyses the type of home, age, gender and level of education. An electronic questionnaire was conducted in five EU countries: Portugal, Spain, France, UK and Germany. The sampling unit was a potential consumer of fish products, whether the buyer or the consumer. The sampling size for each country was Spain (n=410), UK (n=302), Portugal (n=728), Germany (n=300) and France (n=335). The sampling error was calculated in accordance with an infinite T0901317 (population that exceeds 100,000 inhabitants) and with a confidence interval of 95%, whereby p=q=0.5. The sampling error for the total sample was 2.19%. Data were collected between 8 January and 7 March 2014, both inclusive. Once the data had been collected, we debugged the database making sure that all data were properly entered and have been correctly recorded. There were 2075 valid questionnaires. The table of socio-demographic characteristics is shown per each country (see Annex). The consumers were asked to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with different propositions related to items associated with traceability and indicators to signal traceability (see Table 2). These items were measured on 1–5 point Likert scale. They also were asked for other questions related to the willingness to pay for the implicit quality guarantees in said traceability programme and the importance or weight for different quality attributes present in the quality labelling. The final part of the questionnaire collected socio-demographic data of the respondents.
Results: analysis and discussion
Managerial implications
Conclusions
Further research and limitations
Conflict of interest
Acknowledgements
Introduction Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is nowadays part of the recent agenda for (i) public policy makers, like the European Commission (EU COM, 2011), (ii) marketers through CSR indexes and social campaigns worldwide (e.g., Johnson and Johnson or Ikea) and (iii) academics with an increasing number of papers and topics. Despite criticism (Karnani, 2011) CSR is becoming part of the social agenda in magazines and newspapers (Epstein-Reeves, 2012). Among the different stakeholders addressed by CSR, consumers stand for the large economic impact and diversity of assessing effects. Prior literature on CSR and consumers tested the effect of CSR on corporate reputation (Brammer & Millington, 2005; Lichtenstein, Drumwright, & Braig, 2004), emphasizing that one key element in any CSR research should be how corporations report the CSR and consumer perception. Otherwise no matter what kind of CSR practice is implemented by companies or how CSR initiatives engage in, the impact of CSR on consumer behavior may be null or even negative (Du, Bhattacharya, & Sen, 2010). Satisfaction is considered a relevant construct for evaluating customer appraisal. Recent marketing literature is increasingly devoting attention to analysis of customer satisfaction and exogenous variables of company performance such as stock prices (Fornell, Mithas, Forrest, Morgeson, & Krishnan, 2006), employee satisfaction and retention (Frey, Bayón, & Totzek, 2013), and consumer spending growth (Fornell, Rust, & Dekimpe, 2010).