Consumer wine perceptions in the Brand Origin framework: the role of product market value

Despite many studies in the literature have shown that the Brand of Origin (BO) is a well known wine choice factor significantly affecting the consumer purchasing process, further investigations are still necessary. In particular it is not clear how the components that make up part of the consumer’s wine perception can affect the level of importance a consumer associates to the wine’s BO in the purchasing decision process. The paper aims to bridge this gap investigating the buying behavior of Brunello di Montalcino, an “high value wine”, compared to the buying behavior of Chianti Classico, “a medium value wine”. We hypothesized that, in such a case, the consumer’s wine perception components can be important and can moderate (reinforce) the BO effect on purchasing behavior. The analysis was conducted on a total sample of 5,173 consumers originating from USA, Canada; Australia, Germany; UK; Sweden; Belgium; Italy. The results of the ordered logistic regression confirms the relevancy and importance of the BO framework in the process of purchasing wine products. In particular, the results show a different role that the wine consumer perception components such as brand knowledge, brand attitude and brand image can have. Brand knowledge moderate the BO effect in the case of “high value wine” while reinforces it in the case of “medium value wine”; brand attitude reinforce the BO effect only for “medium level wines” while brand image has a general reinforcing role of BO effect both for high and medium value wines. From these findings we derive some managerial implications concerning a different strategic use of BO for wine having a different market value.