Konsumentens dilemma : ekologiskt eller konventionellt?

Sammanfattning: A majority of Swedish consumers have a positive attitude towards organic production and the number of organic products on the market is increasing. Despite these positive trends, there are still relatively few consumers who choose to buy organic produced products. According to statistics, only 3% of the total sales of food consist of organic products. The aim with this essay is to understand what is needed, both from the grocery store and the consumer's point of view, to increase the consumption of organic food. Information has been collected partly through questionnaire with consumers and partly through analysis of sales statistics for a selected numbers of products. Then the empirical material have been analysed in the light of a combination of the Behavioural Perspective Model (Foxell, 1997) and Kotler's Four P:s (Kotler, 2002). Consumer's willingness to buy organic products is influenced by a number of different factors. One important thing is if the grocery store offers a behaviour setting that stimulates the consumers positive attitude and facilitates their possibilities to collect new information. Furthermore, the store needs to offer a broad and well-visualised selection of organic products. The comparison between stores with and without an environmental profile shows that stores with an environmental profile, to a greater extent, have succeeded in creating a situation that stimulates the consumers wish to buy organic products. Another interesting result is that consumer with more than average knowledge of organic production seems to be less sensitive for the price. This group also has a more positive attitude and that strengthen the possibility that the consumer will buy an organic alternative. The goal is to educate the big majority of consumers that, despite a positive attitude, yet don't buy organic products. With increased knowledge they may be convinced to use their positive attitude and change their behaviour. Hopefully, the behaviour later on can evolve to a habit of buying organic products. Results from the multiple-regressions analyses shows that a consumer that buy a certain organic product only is affected by changes in price in equivalent organic products and not by the conventional alternatives. Furthermore its seems that consumers who choose to buy organic products are less price sensitive. The conclusion from the analysis is that lacking knowledge about organic production is the main reason to why many consumers don't by organic food. Increased information in the stores would probably be the simplest and most efficient way of increasing consumption of organic products.