An Innovative Tool to Assess Marketing Capabilities of Traditional Producers within the European Food Industry

Alessandro Banterle (), Laura Carraresi and Stefanella Stranieri

No 49769, 110th Seminar, February 18-22, 2008, Innsbruck-Igls, Austria from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to assess the marketing management capabilities of SMEs producing traditional food products in EU throughout the development of a benchmarking tool. SMEs represent the greater part of European food firms and they find it very difficult to adapt to market changes, and to compete with big enterprises. In this context, marketing management plays a key role in good SMEs performances in the market. The benchmarking tool, utilised to assess marketing capabilities, is aimed at improving critical points in the marketing area of traditional food firms by following the example of the best ones. This method is developed in the innovative form of an interactive questionnaire published on the Web. At the moment the sample is composed by 60 firms located in three member states (Belgium, Italy, and Hungary) producing traditional food products belonging to five sectors (cheese, beer, dry ham, sausage and white pepper). The data were analysed with cluster analysis. Results show that the majority of firms is weak in marketing research, and also the marketing strategy is not well developed. On the other hand, stronger performance is shown in innovation. Related to the size and production, generally, micro sized firms perform worse than small and medium enterprises, and the production of PDO-PGI products affects positively the marketing capabilities.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Farm Management; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Industrial Organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10
Date: 2008-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/49769/files/Banterle.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:eaa110:49769

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.49769

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 110th Seminar, February 18-22, 2008, Innsbruck-Igls, Austria from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().