Marketing communications for organic food products : development and validation of two models leading to purchase intent

This paper aims to understand the antecedents of organic food communications, and how organic food communications could contribute in organic food purchase intentions. The current paper is a part of a larger study that collected data from a nationwide online survey during November 2012. This resulted to 1011 usable responses. This paper used Partial Least Square (PLS) based structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The findings show that there are two major antecedents to perceived organic food communications, namely, controlled marketing communications and perceived organic consumers’ value. The findings also demonstrate three major and significant paths that lead organic food consumers from perceived organic food communication stage to purchase intent stage. These three statistically positive and significant paths are: trust, perception and self-image paths. Thus, the paper explains the role of marketing communications that bridges between consumers’ generally positive attitudes towards organic food and their low level of organic food purchases.