Modern forms of value creation in the global agri-food chain – Perspectives from the facebook ads market

Abstract

Competitiveness has always been considered a vector of innovation that is centered around economic performance; constantly pushing companies to achieve better performance results. In such a modern society deeply marked by digitization, value creation has expanded its scope and it is no longer involving only harnessing customer satisfaction through the quality of the products or services marketed to customers, but it is also involving the permanent digital connection and engagement between the links of any value chain. Digital platforms, including social networks, are major sources of economic concentration where different forms of value emerge. For example, Facebook Inc. runs a business model that involves selling online media space for companies willing to pay money to have consumers of goods and services engage with the ads displayed on Facebook platforms, based on specific group targeting. Taking all of this into consideration, the scientific interest in exploring the nature of an emergent form of value along the chain is implicit. This paper brings its unique contribution to the existing literature concerning the topic of agri-food value chains by providing a niche marketing approach on a paradigm shift at the level of the nature of value generated in the chain in the case of highly digitized societies. The research objective was to bring the sustainability factor into the spotlight of the analysis concerning the paradigm shift of the nature of the value generated in the agri-food value chain. Research results show that some multinational corporations active in the Romanian agri-food sector use the Facebook Ad Market to reach consumers and call for them to engage in activities specific to building a sustainable agri-food system. Thus, by engaging in such activities, consumers feel that they contribute to the corporations’ effort in achieving sustainability. Consequently, a different form of value is generated along the chain.

What does digital transformation do in agriculture? A systematic literature review of Agri-food sector's digitalisation

“…This topic is relatively new as studies have been publishing from 2019 onwards, however, it means 17% of the analysed articles. (Scuderi and Sturiale, 2015;Calvet-Mir et al, 2018;Kabbiri et al, 2018;Fernandez et al, 2019;Caiazza and Bigliardi, 2020;Cristobal-Fransi et al, 2020;Sass et al, 2020;Borrero and Zabalo, 2021;Sedek et al, 2021;Constantin, Rădulescu, et al, 2021;Oruma, Misra and Fernandez-Sanz, 2021 The following fourth category involves papers dealing with the situation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the digital innovation used by this sector. It has a key importance, 9% of the selected papers deals with the different aspects of digitalisation, and in particular the topic of short supply chains in the SME sector.…”

“…It worth noting that half of these articles deal with a detailed analysis of consumer behaviour and the efficiency of commercials on social media platforms in the case of a given product. In the light of the content of these articles, the aims are mainly to determine the potential of own web sites, Twitter and Facebook (Scuderi and Sturiale, 2015;Espelt Rodrigo, Pena-Lopez and Vega, 2017;Caiazza and Bigliardi, 2020;Sass et al, 2020;Borrero and Zabalo, 2021;Constantin, Rădulescu, et al, 2021). The next subcategory is "Big data" which involves articles with a relatively large variety of topics.…”