A cross-cultural consumers’ perspective on social media-based short food supply chains

What is it about?

Within the framework of social-media marketing, consumers are a crucial component of the entire marketing process. Social media has provided consumers with both economic and social power. Also, social media has provided food companies with a great source of information, so they got in their hands the chance to develop an improved customer relationship focusing the marketing efforts on consumers by building short supply chains. This study is addressing the perception of consumers on the creation of short food supply chains on social media which is supposed to be a future game-changing trend in food marketing. The main objective of this study is to get a consumer’s cross-cultural insight on the potential of using social networking sites as short food supply chains. The research group decided to apply the study in three countries with different cultural backgrounds; Mexico, Spain and Egypt. Data were collected from 424 actual social media users throughout the three countries. A qualitative approach, using free-listing tasks and sentence completion techniques, was adopted. Findings indicate that consumers within the three countries would have a high acceptance for this trend. Findings also reflect that consumers share almost the same incentives and worries, except in some cases in which different countries face different circumstances. Results of this study can serve as a first step in attracting the attention of food companies for such opportunity.

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