Examining the potential of grazing dairy farming using a consumer segmentation

Toward the promotion of animal welfare and environmentally friendly production

抄録

As the consumption of livestock products expands worldwide with the globalization of food, their production stresses the environment and poses challenges to humans, such as animal welfare issues. This study examines how the promotion of grazing dairy farming, especially milk production, can be achieved by changing consumer behavior, i.e., through a bottom-up approach. In particular, we will clarify how consumers' knowledge and experience can contribute to their purchasing behavior of grazing milk products. Specifically, we first examine how consumers' knowledge and experience of dairy farming are determined by their personal attributes in a path model. Then, using a choice experiment and a latent class model, we will identify consumers' responses to grazing milk products and examine how consumers can be segmented according to differences in their responses, focusing on the role of knowledge and experience. The analysis reveals that consumers can be classified into three segments, and that knowledge and experience play an important role in their segmentation.