Adam Smith Business School

Anna will speak about her work on ‘Examining The Purchase Motivations Of Occasional Organic Food Consumers: A Cultural Analysis.’

The conference, which promotes undergraduate research in all disciplines meets annually every Spring in a different British university.

Undergraduates submit papers, posters, workshops and performances to the Conference. Abstracts are peer-reviewed and those accepted are invited to attend.

An undergraduate research conference is just like any other academic conference. There will be spoken papers, lectures, poster presentations and workshops — but each one is delivered by undergraduate students presenting work they have done. For two days, students can talk to undergraduate researchers from their own disciplines, and learn how other disciplines approach research problems.

Anna said: “I’ve always been interested in consumer behaviour and once I started studying business, was curious how consumer behaviour affects organisational marketing strategies. I wanted to combine these two interests in my study. Since I myself am an occasional purchaser of organic food, I started looking into organic food consumption - figuring out why consumers are increasingly choosing organic over conventional food and how this trend might affect business.

I was surprised to find that most studies focused just on the regular organic food consumer group. Hardly any looked at occasional organic food consumers. I decided to just focus on the occasional consumer, to add to the literature that investigates the motivations of organic food consumers.

I was hoping my study could be useful to marketers, since many strategies might not consider that there are multiple organic food consumer groups, and that the occasional consumer could hold significant future market value.

I never went into the dissertation process thinking that I might purse an academic career path, but being invited to this conference has opened a new door for me. I am grateful to be able to attend the conference to see whether this is something I might want to consider in the future.”

---

First published: 9 April 2018