Current interview

Centre for Value Chain Research

An interview with Professor Andrew Fearne, University of Kent

About our research

The Centre for Value Chain Research is an applied research centre based at Kent Business School, University of Kent. Our broad interest is in behaviour change:

within and between organisations in the food chain
among final consumers

Our interest in organisational behaviour is focused on sustainable competitive advantage. We believe too few companies look beyond the boundaries of their own business or beyond the short-term planning horizon, which perpetuates a lack of trust between businesses in the food chain and poor information flows from the final consumer through to the suppliers of agricultural inputs. In the context of environmental sustainability, this means that far too few businesses are aware of, understand or even care about the environmental implications of their actions. Sustainable competitive advantage requires businesses to think and act much more strategically and much more holistically – embracing the complexity of economic, social and environmental sustainability as an opportunity not a threat.

Our interest in consumer behaviour is focused on sustainable consumption. We believe consumer awareness of, interest in and understanding of sustainability is insufficient and that government agencies, NGOs and corporations at the frontier of sustainability and behaviour change are devoting too few resources to tackling the attitude-intention-behaviour gap that undoubtedly exists amongst the vast majority of consumers. Raising awareness and increasing knowledge of sustainability only gets us so far – changing behaviour is the acid test and requires a more co-ordinated and carefully targeted effort based on objective evidence of how distinct consumer segments behave (what they buy) and why.

Purpose of the research

We know many producers and food firms are successfully reducing their environmental impact, and in doing so increasing their shareholder value, but we believe those efforts might be more productive if they were applied across firm boundaries. Accordingly, our work is focused on identifying opportunities which require collaboration along a chain to create, realise and share value, with particular interest in agri-food Small and Medium Enterprises.

The methodology – Sustainable Value Chain Analysis (SVCA) is far from complete (we never stop learning!) but has been piloted on the Yalumba-Tesco wine chain, from South Australia to the UK. An important feature of this approach is that it seeks to identify potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that have the potential to create value, for individual agri-food firms and chains as a whole, and the barriers that prevent value chains acting together to exploit those opportunities.

Our consumer research focuses on shopper behaviour, through the analysis of supermarket loyalty card data, to which we gain access as a result of our partnership with dunnhumby – the business that works with Tesco to manage their shopper loyalty program. We do this through our dunnhumby studentships, which provide PhD students with subsidised access to the most sophisticated and comprehensive database of shopper behaviour in the world, covering 1.7 million households and over 30,000 food products. The studentships are funded by trade associations (e.g. the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board, government agencies (e.g. Defra) and regional development agencies (e.g. Scottish Enterprise).

One of our dunnhumby PhD students, Claire May, who is funded by Defra, is looking at sustainable consumption and particularly at the role of carbon labelling. Claire is in the final year of her PhD and will be piloting interventions, both pre-store and in-store, to facilitate the use of carbon labels as a mechanism for helping consumers make lower carbon purchasing decisions. Our view is that carbon labelling is an important step on the long and challenging journey towards sustainable consumption but one that will fail if more effort is not made to inform, educate and engage with individuals, through targeted interventions, in order to affect behaviour where it matters most – at the point of purchase.

Another student, Fred Yamoah, is researching the role of personal values in the supermarket purchasing behaviour for fair trade food products in the UK. His research aims to identify the drivers behind the growth in retail sales of fair trade food which, it is hypothesised, has more to do with loyalty to individual product brands than awareness of or interest in fair trade. Fred will be analysing the dunnhumby data to determine the geo-demographic profiles of fair trade shoppers and the extent of fair trade purchasing behaviour across a range of food categories

Questions we are addressing

1) We are looking to identify ways in which chains can combine commercial and environmental goals – moving beyond compliance and mere eco-efficiency, where managers should be taking a broader view of the potential benefits, such as risk management and shaping the chain’s business environment. However, just because a proposition makes commercial sense does not mean it will happen. Our research to date suggests that more ambitious, intra-firm improvements must be founded on strong relationships, to provide the reassurance that mutual benefits will be derived in the long term. In addition, effective information flows are necessary to ensure that improvements are implemented effectively. This is where value chain analysis helps managers to determine the likelihood of success in partnership projects.

Our approach creates insights for government too, in contributing to the debate over where it needs to facilitate existing market forces to act more effectively, or where those forces are insufficient to pull the behavioural changes needed, and so more stringent interventions are required to push stakeholders in a particular direction.

2) From the perspective of individual (consumer) behaviour our concern is that too many stakeholders are seeking blueprints and quick fixes to the incredibly complex mess the world has got itself into. The same stakeholders, who undoubtedly care passionately about the environment, are quick to criticise initiatives that fall short of the wholesale transformation of social values and incentive structures upon which consumerism is based. Our contention is that ‘every little helps’ on the road to sustainability and that we need to incentivise sustainable consumption in different ways, because of the heterogeneity of consumption and its drivers. This is why the ability to explore shopping behaviour in such detail is so important, as it enables us to:

identify distinct consumer segments based on their actual (not claimed) behaviour
design interventions that are customised for distinct behavioural groups
evaluate the impacts, thereby shining an objective light on what works/does not work and why

Collaboration and benefits

We are keen to collaborate with others in all aspects of our work. In particular, there are three areas in which we are looking for assistance:

To improve our understanding of streamlined approaches to LCA, in order to make our SVCA accessible to SMEs without sacrificing reliability and validity.
We are looking for agri-food SMEs and their chain partners to act as patients - with whom we can operate, in pursuit of improvement projects for the chain (how and where they can save money, add value, reduce their environmental impacts and build more sustainable relationships) and methodological improvements for us and the broader community of researchers. We are looking to undertake a number of SVCA projects through 2010, free of charge to participating businesses.
We are looking for ideas for interventions, pre-store and in-store, that might facilitate more sustainable purchasing decisions in general and low-carbon decisions in particular. We have resources to turn ideas into pilot projects, the impact of which we can measure objectively through analysis of the dunnhumby data.

Some of the people in our research centre

Andrew Fearne has a PhD in agricultural economics and is Professor of Food Marketing and Supply Chain Management at KBS, where he established the Centre for Value Chain Research in 2005. Andrew’s research involves the analysis of consumer behaviour and the co-ordination of value chains, from field to fork, with research partners from around the world. He is the founding editor of the International Journal of Supply Chain Management, author of over 100 articles and is the 14th Adelaide Thinker in Residence.

Marian Garcia is a Senior Lecturer in Agri-food Marketing at the Kent Business School, University of Kent. Her research focuses on the impact of international trade regulations and standards (including environmental standards) on sustainable development and competitiveness of agri-food sectors in developing countries.

Benjamin Dent took a Masters at Imperial College, following 12 years working in Whitehall on environment policy, then worked with Andrew Fearne and colleagues from the Universities of Queensland and Tasmania on VCA projects. Currently also studying for a PhD at University of Queensland. Set up and now chairs the Kent Farmers’ Market Association.

Aminu Shehu is a chartered engineer with 9 years experience of operation, design and environmental management in the oil and gas industry. He has an MSc from Cranfield University and has worked for the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation and M.W. Kellogg. He is now a research associate at KBS.

Claire May is a PhD student focusing on sustainable consumption and consumer behaviour, and particularly on carbon labelling. Claire graduated in 2004 from Sheffield Hallam University with a degree in ‘Food and Consumer Studies’ and worked as a Food Technologist and Home Economist prior to starting the PhD.

Fred Yamoah is a PhD student focusing on the drivers of fair trade food purchases. Fred holds a BSc in Agriculture, a Diploma in Education and Management Studies, and an MBA in marketing. He has experience in teaching and research at both FE and HE levels in marketing, management and agribusiness management.

Contact details and further information

For further information about our work please contact Andrew Fearne.

And for details on all our work, please visit our website.