Can new healthy luxury food products accelerate short food supply chain formation via social media marketing in high-income countries?

Abstract

Social media marketing is a promising tool for successful product placement of new healthy luxury food products, a subcategory of superfoods. Despite its growing popularity, no studies have investigated how social media marketing affects consumers’ quality perception process for such superfoods and whether this provides opportunities for farmers to gain a competitive advantage in direct marketing channels. Therefore, we integrate media richness theory into the food quality guidance model, compile a data set of 697 German fruit consumers from May to June 2020, and analyze this sample via partial least square analysis. Results show that social media marketing is a viable tool for new healthy luxury food products if media content is highly experience providing. Furthermore, it offers opportunities for the formation of shorter food supply chains as farmers could, through the provision of engaging social media marketing content, sell new healthy luxury food products directly to the final consumer. This research provides implications to farmers, retailers and policy makers to exploit the social media marketing potential of new healthy luxury food products.