Innovation through tradition in the Italian coffee industry: an analysis of customers’ perceptions

Michele Gorgoglione (), Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli () and Umberto Panniello ()
Additional contact information
Michele Gorgoglione: Politecnico di Bari
Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli: Politecnico di Bari
Umberto Panniello: Politecnico di Bari

Review of Managerial Science, 2018, vol. 12, issue 3, No 4, 682 pages

Abstract: Abstract The extant literature reveals how firms may innovate by exploiting past competencies and resources, hence proposing innovation through tradition as an emerging strategy to compete. Previous research largely demonstrates that the effectiveness of an innovation strategy is strictly dependent on the capability of firms to communicate the right message to their customers. Therefore, leveraging products’ attributes becomes fundamental to strategically position their commercial offerings in the minds of the target audience. Nevertheless, despite the well-known relevance of this issue, scant attention has been devoted to investigate the product attributes that consumer’s associate with innovation and with tradition when companies deploy strategies based on “innovation through tradition”. Accordingly, our study aims at covering this gap, by empirically analyzing the consumers’ perception of innovation and tradition in the Italian coffee industry through a positioning analysis. Our research allowed us to identify two sets of product attributes that consumers associate with innovation and tradition. The results show that in many cases the innovation-related and tradition-related attributes are strongly negatively correlated, but in some case the correlation is weak or close to zero. These attributes reveal that in some cases innovation and tradition can be combined in the perception of consumers, rather than representing opposite constructs. This result suggests that companies can effectively communicate the strategy of innovation through tradition to the consumers’ minds, but this must be done by choosing the right attributes.

Keywords: Innovation; Tradition; Customer perceptions; Positioning; 91C99 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11846-017-0226-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:rvmgts:v:12:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11846-017-0226-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/business/journal/11846

DOI: 10.1007/s11846-017-0226-3

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Managerial Science is currently edited by R. Ewert and W. Kürsten

More articles in Review of Managerial Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().