Abstract
Enormous quantities of data are generated through social and online media in the era of Web 2.0. Understanding consumer perceptions or demand efficiently and cost effectively remains a focus for economists, retailer/consumer sciences, and production industries. Most of the efforts to understand demand for food products rely on reports of past market performance along with survey data. Given the movement of content-generation online to lay users via social media, the potential to capture market-influencing shifts in sentiment exists in online data. This analysis presents a novel approach to studying consumer perceptions of production system attributes using eggs and laying hen housing, which have received significant attention in recent years. The housing systems cage-free and free-range had the greatest number of online hits in the searches conducted, compared with the other laying hen housing types. Less online discussion surrounded enriched cages, which were found by other methods/researchers to meet many key consumer preferences. These results, in conjunction with insights into net sentiment and words associated with different laying hen housing in online and social media, exemplify how social media listening may complement traditional methods to inform decision-makers regarding agribusiness marketing, food systems, management, and regulation. Employing web-derived data for decision-making within agrifood firms offers the opportunity for actionable insights tailored to individual businesses or products.
Keywords
big data; consumer demand; consumer perceptions; egg production; social media analytics
Date of this Version
10-30-2020
Recommended Citation
Widmar, Nicole Olynk; Bir, Courtney; Wolf, Christopher; Lai, John; and Liu, Yangxuan, "#Eggs: social and online media-derived perceptions of egg-laying hen housing" (2020). Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications. Paper 24.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/agedocs/24
Comments
This is the publisher PDF of Widmar, NO, Bir, C; Wolf, C; Lai, J, and Liu, Y. (2020) "#Eggs: social and online media-derived perceptions of egg-laying hen housing." Poultry Science, 99(11): 5697-5706. Published CC-BY-NC-ND by Elsevier, the version of record and ADA Title II compliant version is available in HTML at DOI: 10.1016/j.psj.2020.07.011.