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With the advancement of technology, together with the application of plant and animal drugs, growth hormone, breeding and genetic engineering technology the abuse of chemicals have brought about environmental issues, such as ecological damage, greenhouse effect, global warming, and other environmental issues
People nowadays eat too much and too good, which often leads to heart disease, hypertension, and other diseases of civilization. To fight against the disease, the food culture has changed significantly. Organic agriculture, which pollutes the environment and destroys the ecology less and contributes to support consumer health and safety, thus catches more and more attention.
In the recent years, an increasing number of researches have been conducted on the consumer behavior of organic agriculture products. Most of the researches tend to be quantitative researches, and quantitative researches focus on experiments. When quantitative research method is applied to the consumer behavior of organic agriculture products, people can easily understand the consumer behavior at the moment, but they can neither understand the contexts nor learn the evolution of this consumer behavior.
To enhance this study, which is based on qualitative research approach and applies grounded theory methods, an in-depth interview has been conducted to ten people who have consumed organic agricultural products for more than one year. With the increase of the vegetarian population, this study also discusses the different consumer behaviors of the vegetarians and non-vegetarians in consumption of organic agriculture products.
Through data collecting, encoding, sorting, and analyzing, the consumer behavior mode of organic products consumption has been constructed, which includes consumption behaviors (i.e. purchasing, eating, evaluating, and learning), background factors (i.e. physical and mental status, religion and beliefs, environmental awareness, and social trends), other interaction objects (i.e. organic products distributors, organic products, organic knowledge, and the ecological environment), self-interactions (i.e. physical sensation, psychological emotion, relationships, and values), and afterward actions (i.e. in daily life or at work). The following six subjects are thus derived.
1. Different self-interaction exists at different stage of consumer behavior. 2. Different interactions with other objects occur at different stage of consumer behavior. 3. Consumers’ religious background influences the consumer behavior of organic agriculture products. 4. In consumption of organic agriculture products, different interaction objects symbolize different values to consumers. 5. The consumer behavior of organic agriculture products also affects the daily lives after the consumption. 6. Consumers with different eating habits also have significantly different consumer behaviors in consumption of organic agriculture products.
Finally, this study provides the organic distributors with concrete suggestions of marketing strategies which were developed according to the consumer behavior of organic agriculture products as well as consumers’ interactions with other objects and the self-interaction objects.
Key words: organic agricultural product, consumer behavior, Grounded Theory
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