Examining consumers’ anti-consumption tendencies towards food products

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers’ reactions lead to anti-consumption (AC) behavior and provide some important clues for the practitioners in the Turkish food industry. The reactions are based on consumer complaining behavior in the Turkish food industry. Design/methodology/approach In total, 16 brands from the food industry with the highest complaint rates were selected as cases of the study. The consumer complaints from these brands were analyzed through a qualitative content analysis. In this analysis, four categories which are beverage group, food preparation group, junk food group, and delicatessen group were observed as the top complained sectors. Findings The authors made up five semantic categories and one emoticon category which are AC/boycott tendency discourse, bad hygiene, bad servicescape, deceptive advertisement and defective products based on consumer complaints and disappointed, astonished, devil, pouting, confounded, angel. The results imply that especially unfamiliar objects in food products, unconcerned customer services, deceptive campaigns and spoiled products make consumers exhibit AC behavior. In addition, consumers coded with emoticons as pouting, devil and disappointed are more inclined than others to stop purchasing, respectively. Research limitations/implications Due to the qualitative nature of the study, the authors do not make a generalization for the field. AC behavior, deceptive campaign, spoiled products, brand lose confidence and children sensitivity can be investigated with a quantitative study. And a new scale for this field can be developed. Through this scale development, researchers can reach new dimensions and expand the literature about the AC behaviors. Practical implications An important implication which the authors got from the cases of the study is Hygiene. Although all cases have hygiene standards such as hazard analysis and critical control point, International Organization for Standardization (ISO 9001), etc., BH and spoiled products codes have high ranks among the cases. Due to this reason, companies should pay attention to their hygiene standards and increase the control period of the production process. Through the empowerment of the hygiene standards, they can fix their bad image on the customers and increase their dependability among the consumers. Social implications In the context of this case study, customer service emerges as an important problem and concept. Insufficient customer service infrastructure should be developed and their institutionalization processes should be empowered by the firms. The authors believe that the deficiency of the institutionalization plays an important role on these problems. And the institutionalization level on the field among the cases of the firms particularly should be investigated by the researchers. Furthermore, companies can increase their complaint management efficiency by joining new complaint websites. Through this manner, they can learn how to deal with different problems and increase their problem-solving skills. Originality/value This study provides a comprehensive insight into consumers’ AC behavior. It reveals detailed drivers which may lead to AC behavior and contributes to the existing literature by determining the possible antecedents of AC behavior.