Comparison of Consumer Involvement Across PLB Categories in Retail Food

Food retail categories are considered to be have low involvement and have few publications. The aims of this research are to explore the level of involvement of different categories in the food industry and to discover how this involvement affects private label share in each category. A new scale of involvement was constructed using six sources of involvement. The data set includes a consumer survey of 1652 shoppers in conjunction with data mining from sales of food chain retailers. The results showed that when using the proposed scale, a large difference exists in the level of involvement between categories, there are significant differences in the effect of the source on each category, and consumers show a large range of importance that they attach to each source and category. The level of involvement is negatively correlated to its standard deviation. Regression analysis suggests that the level of involvement influences negatively the share of private label brands in the category (percentage of category sales) and the relative number of PLB buyers in the category. These results can aid the retail merchant in introducing new PLB categories.