Analyzing proprietary, private label, and non-brands in fresh produce purchases

Abstract

When purchasing packaged products within a supermarket, consumers choose between proprietary or private label brands. However, when purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables, non-branded produce is the dominant option—with proprietary and private label brands only recently becoming available. Previous fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) research finds that proprietary and private label brands affect consumer loyalty—however, no research exists for fresh categories. This research is the first to determine the effect of emerging brands in fresh categories on consumer buying behavior. Our research examines consumers’ loyalty toward proprietary, private label, or non-branded fresh fruits and vegetables and the level of customer sharing between these options, using analytical approaches applicable to FMCG categories. The panel data contains nearly 46,000 households making over 8 million purchases in the United States during 2015. Results show that proprietary, private label, and now non-branded fresh produce have expected loyalty levels, for their size, and consumers share their purchases across the three options (i.e., consumers are not loyal to just one option). The study analyzes and interprets purchase data in fresh categories offering marketing academics and practitioners actionable advice for working with fresh produce purchase data.

How websites compete in the Middle East: The example of Iran

“…Overall, Table 7 shows the average inter‐PSI value of 1.13 across all product categories. The result aligns with the limited previous studies investigating the PSI, which only explored the consumer goods categories (Anesbury, Jürkenbeck, et al, 2020; Sjostrom et al, 2014). For instance, Anesbury, Jürkenbeck, et al (2020) studied the fresh fruits and vegetable purchasing produced by private label, non‐branded and proprietary brands.…”

“…The result aligns with the limited previous studies investigating the PSI, which only explored the consumer goods categories (Anesbury, Jürkenbeck, et al, 2020; Sjostrom et al, 2014). For instance, Anesbury, Jürkenbeck, et al (2020) studied the fresh fruits and vegetable purchasing produced by private label, non‐branded and proprietary brands. On average, they found a PSI of 1.25 for proprietary brands, 1.49 for private labels and 0.88 for non‐branded produce.…”

How persistent are duplication of purchase partitions?

“…The current study builds on methods used in previous DoP research (Lam & Ozorio, 2013;Scriven & Danenberg, 2010) and Partition Sharing Index (PSI) studies (Anesbury et al, 2020;Anesbury, Greenacre, et al, 2018;Sjostrom et al, 2014), extending the analysis over three consecutive years of data. The approach enables an exploration of whether partitions persist from period to period and over the entire period.…”

“…The inter-and intra-PSI both use Equation (2), however, inter-PSI examines the level of sharing between two groups of brands, while intra-PSI examines the level of sharing within a group of two or more brands. When the brands have an intra-PSI of 1.2 or higher, they are potentially managerially significant and are classified as partitions (Anesbury et al, 2020;Anesbury, Greenacre, et al, 2018;Sjostrom et al, 2014).…”

The Dirichlet model in marketing

“…It has been extended to choice situations including fresh fruit and vegetables in multiple countries (Anesbury et al, 2020;Anesbury, Greenacre, et al, 2018;Anesbury, Nguyen, & Bogomolova, 2018) Lam, 2016); performing arts choice (Hand & Dall'Olmo Riley, 2016); sports code choice (Fujak et al, 2018), physical activity itself (Gruneklee et al, 2016;Wilson et al, 2017) and gambling behaviours (Lam & Mizerski, 2009). And there are early indications that blood donations show typical 'Dirichlet' type behaviour (Faulkner et al, 2016).…”