Collective Brands and Intention to Buy: A Preliminary Study on Wine Consumption

Agri-food collective brands are the outcome of long institutional and normative certification paths and aim to guarantee the preservation of tradition and to assert the unicity of products, depending on the area where they are produced or on the origin of their components. Because of their nature, they can be considered as institutional guarantee of goods’ quality standard or of country/region of origin and, more important, they can be considered as instruments to reinforce and better communicate local and traditional products. Because of their potential ability to enhance product uniqueness perception, collective brands could be a powerful tool to preserve and reinforce firm market positioning: indeed, strong positive associations between products and places can highly support marketing success. This paper aims to test how awareness about collective brands impact on consumer intention to buy. More specifically, an empirical study has been carried out on 198 Italian wine consumers, that has been asked to describe their knowledge about wine, their wine consumption patterns, their attitude towards wine consumption, their commitment with the product and their intention to buy collective branded or generic branded wine. Respondents have also been distinguished on the basis of weak, medium or strong associations they were able to elicit about collective brands. Preliminary results show collective brands are preferred in social consumption contexts, as they probably guarantee good product performance and therefore social approval. Moreover, buying intention of consumers with strong associations are mainly driven by emotional judgment, whereas cognitive judgment prevail when consumers show weak collective brands associations.