Mobilizing the latent consumer demand for animal-friendly products: an interdisciplinary system approach to support stakeholders? decision making

Within the current international economic and political environment improved welfare of farm animals relies predominantly on market initiatives. The Dutch market for pork and chicken meat products is characterized by a small market segment of consumers that buy products with added ethical value (e.g. organic) and a large segment that buys mainstream products. Despite previous attempts to improve animal welfare through market initiatives, animal-friendly products still play a minor role on the Dutch market. The scientific understanding of what inhibits a breakthrough of animal-friendly products in the market is still only partial, because scientists have paid insufficient attention to integrative aspects of the demand through the chain (from consumer to farm). Whereas existing research has focused on creating a market for animal-friendly products by increasing consumer information on animal welfare, this project will focus on differentiated product supply (in terms of animal welfare standards, price and communication) to cater consumer segments that have different ways of expressing morality in product choices. Such differentiated supply (e.g. as a ?middle market segment? in between mainstream and organic) can only be achieved as a joint, coordinated and simultaneous action of all stakeholders, because it introduces uncertainties and mutual dependencies along the chain. Hence, this project adopts an integrated approach: it analyses these issues from need satisfaction at the consumer level all the way through to financial profit and risk considerations at the farm-level. The project comprises an interdisciplinary effort through three PhD-projects addressing fundamental knowledge gaps at the level of the consumer, the level of the chain/retail, and at the farm-level. PhD1 (consumer studies and consumer ethics) will develop a consumer segmentation based the different decision-rules that consumers may apply in integrating moral concerns in product choices and it will validate these findings in choice experiments that are more robust against social response biases. PhD2 (marketing strategy and business-society relationships) will focus on the complementary resources of chains to create a market for animal-friendly products (e.g. knowledge, skills, competencies). To this respect it will develop and analyze a database with a large variety of strategies for market creations for products that address social concerns (including animal welfare). PhD3 (business economics and animal sciences) will analyze the implementation of animal welfare standards at the farm level in terms of economic consequences, also capturing the moral concerns of farmers. A simultaneous PostDoc-project (funded by stakeholders) integrates the knowledge in a series of stakeholder workshops that develop and refine strategic options for stakeholder decision-making. Stakeholders that participate in the workshop represent animal interests, as well as all important levels of the chain from farm to retail. Such strategic options consist of a market introduction plan to target one or more market segments, with a (portfolio of) product propositions defined in terms of price, communication, and level of animal welfare supported by (coalitions of) stakeholders across the chain. The overall aim of the project is to provide stakeholders with an evidence-based knowledge framework that will help them to mobilize the latent demand for animal welfare (think of insight in success and failure factors as well as boundary conditions to potential strategies) as well as recommendations for policy-makers on how to facilitate market initiatives and increase the probability of success. Thereby, this project primarily responds to the third key field of the NWO-LNV program The value of animal welfare, which emphasizes ?knowledge development with stakeholder participation, to achieve structural developments towards sustainable livestock farming?.