Common Myths Regarding Organic Shopping Behavior

By Laurie Demeritt


There is a common set of assumptions held by many in the organic industry regarding consumer shopping behavior that simply does not hold true. Consumer shopping behavior is changing dramatically. Organic consumers cannot be as easily or consistently categorized as some marketers would like. Even the most hardcore consumers are influenced by external factors that can affect their ultimate purchasing decisions.

As in any other grocery product category, organic manufacturers should be aware of the current realities of consumer behavior, recognizing that they may run contrary to long-held beliefs. Four of these organic shopping myths are outlined below, along with their respective consumer realities.

Myth 1. Brand Loyalty Drives Organic Shopping Behavior
Myth: Consumer interest in specific organic brands drives shopping behavior in consistently meaningful ways in grocery, drug and mass retailing.

Reality: Most consumers orient themselves to shopping based on “How do I get what I need?” and “Where should I shop for it?” Brand loyalty quickly falls to the wayside for the sake of getting things done.

With the somewhat rare exception of consumers who seek very specific organic products or ingredients (e.g., recipe completion shopping), most consumers orient themselves to the shopping experience by going through a highly generalized decision tree:

1. What tasks motivate me to go shopping?

2. Where can I get the items to accomplish these tasks?

3. When can I get to stores that will get me these items?

Evidence indicates that consumers begin almost all shopping occasions long before they get in the car. And thinking about organic brands is almost never the first thing that happens, even for shoppers who exhibit measurable brand loyalty. For many consumers, shopping occasions are associated with specific kinds of tasks, some of which may not actually occur to them until they enter the store. On the surface, these tasks may seem related simply to product inventory management—“We’re out of ‘X’, at home, so let’s replenish our stock”—but that isn’t always the case. When they arrive at the market, shoppers aren’t thinking solely about replenishing depleted volumes of a specific organic brand: they think about getting items that will get at-home tasks accomplished. This primary goal may lead to replenishment of a familiar brand or it may cause brand switching.

Myth 2. Behavioral Scripts Drive Organic Shopping Behavior in Mainstream Grocery Stores
Myth: Consumers shop based on innate “ways of doing” that are learned from parents or peers.

Reality: Shopping behavior is less about identity cues than it is about response to a unique collection of cultural occasions.

Behavioral scripts are deeply ingrained, tacit models-for-action that guide behavior that otherwise appears habitual or subconscious. Behavioral scripts are present when consumers shop for key symbolic lifestyle goods, whose chief purpose is as much about identity as utility. Automobiles, clothing, houses and furniture are all goods that tell others who we are, so it should come as little surprise that when shopping for such products we revert to models of action learned mostly from our parents or from the social peer groups that define us. When buying these symbolic items, larger ticket prices correlate to greater emotional investment.

Quite to the contrary of the case for automobiles or fashion, research indicates that most organic grocery shopping behavior is less about signaling identity cues than it is a collection of cultural occasions, variously linked to notions of home provisioning, home life and social life. Here, behavioral scripts take a backseat to culturally mediated shopping occasions, such as weekly shopping, the after-work supplemental shopping trip, or the coffee shop experience.

Cultural occasions for shopping are those occasions in which the motivations for the shopping, the intended beneficiaries of the shopping, and the push/pull forces shaping the shopping journey connect to shared orientations, preferences and value systems that transcend demographic categories.

Myth 3: Organic Shopping Behavior is About Consumers Fulfilling Their Fixed Needs
Myth: Organic consumers have innate, predictable needs that drive behavior.

Reality: Cultural occasions drive shopping behavior.

Many analysts of retail behavior frequently refer to “need states” and “drivers” in their analyses of shopping behavior. Typically, these needs are framed as objective, rational means-to-an-end forces that drive or initiate shopping behavior in a straightforward fashion, regardless of the shopping occasion.

While social and cultural forces aren’t necessarily rational, they do generate context-specific tasks that require completion. It is these resulting tasks that are often confused as rational needs. In addition, specific shopping occasions trigger different social and emotional orientations that affect shoppers’ tendency to buy certain kinds of impulse items, regardless of the channel they choose to shop in.

For example, think about one of the most universal of human behaviors: parenting. It happens in all cultures, despite its many different permutations. One way of looking at shopping behavior among parents is to assume that parents have certain shopping needs in accordance with how they choose to raise their children. But do parents really shop for their children the same way all the time, as this line of thinking might imply for most marketers? Is even the most concerned parent always that consistent?

Many parents exhibit higher wellness standards at home than when they are purchasing food for their children beyond the home. At home, for dinner their children may “need” organic dairy and fresh fruits and vegetables—with no exceptions. They also may have their children bring this kind of food to school, as well. These kinds of parents will tell you they need these kinds of grocery products to be good parents, but the marketing mistake would be to assume that whenever they buy food for their children, they operate under the sway of this “need for organics.” The reality is that many of these parents also may allow their children to eat fast food on a harried road trip or let them buy nonorganic potato chips at the grocery store after a big soccer game, because they “deserves a reward.” There will always be external factors that have the possibility of impacting a parent’s decision to purchase organics.

This shows that the cultural occasion for shopping becomes paramount, even when the shopper is shopping for the same group of people every week. When we approach our understanding of the shopper experience from within a specific, culturally-shaped occasion, we see that the products and the brands that appear along the way are really tools to complete occasion-specific tasks and not drivers within the shopping experience itself.

Myth 4: Organic Shopping Behavior Varies Significantly by Category
Myth: Consumers shop differently depending upon the retail category.

Reality: Consumers shop differently depending upon distinctions of “packaged” and “fresh.”

One of the longstanding assumptions about consumers is that their shopping behavior varies in meaningful ways across grocery categories, such as frozen, snacks, canned goods and beverages. However, the common categories around which analysts, retailers and manufacturers have structured their business remain largely industry categories. That is, these categories comprise a taxonomy that has more to do with organizing work processes into a logical, comprehensible framework for operations managers in retail than it does facilitating consumer shopping behavior in any intuitive manner.

Consumers, too, prefer to work within familiar frameworks, with most having long since adapted to this the dominant, though arbitrary, taxonomy in grocery retailing. But as a result, such category distinctions function largely as navigational aids or ways of knowing where to find things, failing to figure prominently in critical explanations of consumer shopping behavior.

The single most salient cultural distinction currently driving consumer behavior in grocery and drug—a distinction that affects every retail channel—is the distinction between “packaged” and “fresh.” There is a single, overarching theme encompassing the vast cultural shift in the food world, namely, the pursuit of all things real—expressed here primarily through cultural distinctions of “fresh.” Aware as we have become of the perceived mediocrity and/or predictability of processed or packaged products, consumers consistently turn to so-called “fresh” counterparts in pursuit of a healthier, tastier, more interesting or a more distinguished way of life. This does not mean consumers have abandoned processed or packaged foods. It does mean that they see the distinctions between packaged/processed and fresh as the most salient cultural distinction in the food world. Such distinctions are often seen as indicators of quality, healthfulness and taste, and often affect consumer shopping behavior in critical directions.

Likewise, the cues that signal “fresh” to consumers often may have little to do with an objective understanding of the term “fresh.” For example, the most important “fresh” cues for consumers usually have much more to do with the product’s packaging, refrigeration and location within the store than the taste or texture of the product.

Consumers perceive products with minimal to no packaging to generally be “the freshest.” Second, products in refrigerated sections always score high marks in terms of freshness perceptions, the operative logic being that refrigerated areas are reserved for the most perishable of products—those products that don’t adapt well to freezing and are too fragile to merely display on the store floor.

Finally, the historical tendency in grocery retail to locate key “fresh” departments (e.g., dairy, meat, seafood, and bakery) on the perimeter of the store (ostensibly because the physical connections to “backstage” areas made them easier to staff and service) has also had a lasting affect on consumers’ shopping habits. As irrational as it may seem, fresh-interested consumers accustomed to floating around the perimeter of the store to patronize departments such as meats and seafood now tend to ascribe higher freshness perceptions to products located in these areas, regardless of the objective reality.

Laurie Demeritt is President and COO of The Hartman Group, a leading consulting and market research firm specializing in the analysis and interpretation of consumer lifestyles. She can be reached at laurie@hartman-group.com.