‘We Are Family’—How Urban Specialty Shops Portray the Consumers of Rural Provenance Foods

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer report for socsci-1685847, “‘We are family’ - How urban specialty shops portray the consumers of rural provenance foods?”

Overview and general recommendation

 The paper analyses the promotional material, printed and online, for rural foods from 30 shops in three cities in Portugal. It performs a content analysis of the promotional material, focusing on the content related to the shop and the consumers.

The authors find that rural food promotion is not gathered toward consumers of a specific demographic segment. The promotion indeed mostly focuses on value-based and emotional appeal to consumers or identification of the consumer with the product.

General comments

1. The paper does not clearly explain why it is relevant to study how consumers are portrayed and engaged by the producers. This should be added in the introduction and conclusions.

 

2. A description of the case study is missing. Describe how the fact that the analysis is based on three Portuguese cities might influence the results. What are the characteristics of the market for rural food products in Portugal with respect to other markets? You later mention that most of the promotion targets tourists, which is a very feature specific to Portugal (more than in places like, let us say, Central America).

 

3. The definition of rural produce is not specified. Most food products are from rural areas, so it would be beneficial to define the characteristics of the products in consideration for this study.

 

4. The literature and the results section should be streamlined.

 

Other comments

5. The method section should mirror the lit review (start with emphasized sociodemographic characteristics).

 

6. Better explain the categorization of the universe of 113 shops. You mention “hierarchical cluster analysis performed upon the results of a survey”. It would be interesting to know more about the survey and classification.

 

7. How do you collect the printed promotional material? Did you contact the shops asking for their material?

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Answers to Reviewer 1

 

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

Overview and general recommendation

The paper analyses the promotional material, printed and online, for rural foods from 30 shops in three cities in Portugal. It performs a content analysis of the promotional material, focusing on the content related to the shop and the consumers.

The authors find that rural food promotion is not gathered toward consumers of a specific demographic segment. The promotion indeed mostly focuses on value-based and emotional appeal to consumers or identification of the consumer with the product.

We would like to express our gratitude to the Reviewer for the comments and suggestions to our manuscript. We have made several changes accordingly and do hope that the manuscript can be considered for publication in its current state. Please see our answers below.

 

General comments

1. The paper does not clearly explain why it is relevant to study how consumers are portrayed and engaged by the producers. This should be added in the introduction and conclusions.

 

Thank you for your comment, we have now added to the introduction (lines 51 to 59) and conclusion (lines 685 to 691) two paragraphs highlighting the added value of addressing how consumers are portrayed and reached by the retailers (the urban specialty shops’ owners or managers). Therefore, we also would like to clarify that the focus of our study is not how consumers are portrayed and engaged by the producers, but instead by the retailers through the promotional materials.

 

1. A description of the case study is missing. Describe how the fact that the analysis is based on three Portuguese cities might influence the results.

What are the characteristics of the market for rural food products in Portugal with respect to other markets? You later mention that most of the promotion targets tourists, which is a very feature specific to Portugal (more than in places like, let us say, Central America).

We appreciate your remark and added a brief positioning of the three cities surveyed in the section 3.1. Data Collection (lines 243 to 246) and, also, a small reflection on the Portuguese case (lines 221 to 224) and the potential impact of this sub-sampling at the end of the third paragraph of page 17, in the Conclusions’ section (lines 751 to 757).

 

1. The definition of rural produce is not specified. Most food products are from rural areas, so it would be beneficial to define the characteristics of the products in consideration for this study.

 

Thank you for the remark, a common definition was indeed lacking. We included our chosen definition of rural provenance food in page 3 of the Literature Review (lines 84 to 94), adding some references, as well.

 

1. The literature and the results section should be streamlined.

 

Thank you for the comment, we have now divided the Results and the Discussion in two different sections (also following the suggestion of another Reviewer). We believe that both sections are more consonant with the literature review. Additionally, we have reordered the topics on the Methodology section to make the Results section easier to follow (see also 5. below). 

 

Other comments

1. The method section should mirror the lit review (start with emphasized sociodemographic characteristics).

Thank you for the remark, we have now reordered the topics in the section 3.1 – Data Collection in page 5 (lines 234 to 240) to accommodate your suggestion. We believe that the paper is now more fluid between the literature review, the methodology, results and discussion sections.

1. Better explain the categorization of the universe of 113 shops. You mention “hierarchical cluster analysis performed upon the results of a survey”. It would be interesting to know more about the survey and classification.

 

Thank you, we have now added some more information and the indication of a previous article published on the survey and typology of the 113 shops initially surveyed. Considering that all the results presented here are focused on the promotional materials collected from the sub-sample of 30 stores and that there is already a published article detailing the results from that survey and typology, we believe that it could be a little bit confusing to develop more on that, besides what we have now added (lines 247 to 267) following your remark.

 

1. How do you collect the printed promotional material? Did you contact the shops asking for their material?

 

The printed promotional materials were collected in person in each one of the 30 stores analysed here, that we had previously contacted. The websites’ publications and Facebook and Instagram posts were collected by the research team, online. We have now added a more detailed explanation in the section 3.1. – Data collection (lines 264 to 269).

Reviewer 2 Report

The aim of the article entitled 'We are family-How urban speciality shops portray the consumers of rural provenance foods?' is twofold. First, the authors analyse whether and how the marketing communication of speciality retailers includes the consumers. Second, the authors characterise the interaction between the marketing aims and consumer choices and values. In this study, the main contribution is to demonstrate how local food stores implement the knowledge gained in consumer behaviour into their marketing communications (e.g., choices and values).

In general, the paper is well written and organised. However, the authors should consider some minor issues.

The introduction provides sufficient background and includes relevant references. However, it is pretty long. I suggest reducing the length of this section.

The materials and methods section. Although the authors showed details about the sample, a description of the coding guide (e.g., exclusion/inclusion criteria beyond the criteria of being a Portuguese rural provenance food product) was not presented.

Results. The authors blend results and discussion in one section and it is pretty difficult to follow your arguments. In this regard, I suggest separating both into two different sections.

 

Conclusions. This section is characterised by the reflection of the authors on their results in order to highlight the study's contribution, limitations and future research lines. In consequence, conclusions should be more concise, and void including references to other works.

Author Response

Answers to Reviewer 2

 

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The aim of the article entitled 'We are family-How urban speciality shops portray the consumers of rural provenance foods?' is twofold. First, the authors analyse whether and how the marketing communication of speciality retailers includes the consumers. Second, the authors characterise the interaction between the marketing aims and consumer choices and values. In this study, the main contribution is to demonstrate how local food stores implement the knowledge gained in consumer behaviour into their marketing communications (e.g., choices and values).

In general, the paper is well written and organised. However, the authors should consider some minor issues.

We would like to express our gratitude to the Reviewer for the comments and suggestions to our manuscript. We have made several changes accordingly and we do hope that the manuscript can be now considered for publication in its current state. Please see our answers below.

The introduction provides sufficient background and includes relevant references. However, it is pretty long. I suggest reducing the length of this section.

We thank you for your comment. We have now reduced the length of the Literature Review section, excluding a part that was not further developed in the discussion of the results. The references and the way this section was elaborated is, however, important to understand and analyse our results.

The materials and methods section. Although the authors showed details about the sample, a description of the coding guide (e.g., exclusion/inclusion criteria beyond the criteria of being a Portuguese rural provenance food product) was not presented.

We appreciate this comment. We have now developed the criteria in more detail in the section 3.1 of Data Collection (lines 254 to 275) and 3.2. of Data Analysis (lines 291 to 293) and are also attaching to this review the NVIVO codebook. The codebook is, however, ellaborated in Portuguese as the materials analysed were, for the large part, written in Portuguese and were analysed in this language. We would like to remind the reviewer that – as it is explained in the paragraph starting on line 294 (page 7) – in the present article, just the categories related to the consumers’ representations by the shops’ promotional materials were analysed.

Results. The authors blend results and discussion in one section and it is pretty difficult to follow your arguments. In this regard, I suggest separating both into two different sections.

We appreciate the comment and have divided the section in two: 4. Results (starting line 304) and 5. Discussion (starting line 557). We do hope that is now easier to follow our arguments and discussion.

Conclusions. This section is characterised by the reflection of the authors on their results in order to highlight the study's contribution, limitations and future research lines. In consequence, conclusions should be more concise, and void including references to other works.

We thank the Reviewer for this remark. We have now excluded references to other works in the Conclusion section and tried to synthetize more the main findings.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents interesting information that has not been covered elsewhere in the literature. The paper is improved significantly over the initial draft, and my initial concerns were properly addressed in the revised manuscript. One remaining suggestion would be to streamline the new section Discussion.