Establishment of Marketing Strategies for Fruits as Gifts Utilizing the Interaction between Consumers

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24580336
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Agro-economics
• Research Institution: National Agriculture and Food Research Organization
• Principal Investigator: ISOJIMA Akiyo 独立行政法人農業・食品産業技術総合研究機構, 東北農業研究センター生産基盤研究領域, 主任研究員 (00355257)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): HASEGAWA Tetsuya 独立行政法人農業・食品産業技術総合研究機構, 東北農業研究センター生産基盤研究領域, 主任研究員 (70355262)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 果物 / 贈答 / 消費者 / おすそわけ / 農家直販 / 顧客拡大

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study formulates a marketing strategy for gifts of fruit based on interactions between consumers. A questionnaire survey revealed that most consumers enjoyed giving some of the apples they had received to neighbors and friends and that some of those recipients became new customers.
Accordingly, we devised “gift-sharing bags” as a tool for promoting the process discovered by the survey and distributed them experimentally. The bags received positive feedback from most consumers, who indicated a strong possibility that they would use them. An experiment conducted at a large orchard revealed that new customers placed orders after receiving a gift-sharing bag. Hence, distributing gift-sharing bags was shown to increase buyer motivation and connect consumers with producers.

Free Research Field

農業経済学