Pack Membership: A Study of Canada's Competitive Position in International Food Markets

The cornerstone of this dissertation is the notion that people tend to categorize objects and constructs around them according to perceptual and cognitive processes. Following the general principles of categorization, it is assumed that categorization is a hierarchical process which results in different categorization schemes depending on the level of cognition. It is also recognized that an object may be classified in multiple categories at the same time (Ross and Murphy, 1999). The stronger the association between stimulus objects, the stronger the generalization effect within the category to which they belong (Tversky, 1977).;This research, conducted in four international markets (i.e., Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the U.S.), provides strong support for the existence of a perceptual categorization process whereby consumers evaluate food systems from different countries. It was found that, following this categorization tendency, consumers associated Canada with each of its competitors (i.e., the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands, and France) across tested markets. While the effectiveness of this cognitive scheme was influenced by consumers' familiarity with Canadian products, consumers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canadian products tended to rely on the pack membership cue to a larger extent than on the country-of-origin image cue in their evaluative judgments of the Canadian food industry. The predominance of schema evaluation was affected only when consumers perceived a particular country as unique or distinctive in the international food markets.;Categorization in the case of this research begins with the premise that people make assumptions about the performance of an individual country's food system based on their perceptions of the food systems of one or more countries that are perceived as belonging to the same category or pack. At the most inclusive (abstract) level of classification, people may make inferences about an individual food system based on a simplistic dichotomous categorization: the food system is either placed within the category or pack of economically developed countries or among those that do not enjoy economic prosperity. At a more detailed level of abstraction in the categorization system, the food systems of some pack members may be perceived as more closely compatible based on similarities between these countries across a wide range of characteristics from technological development and environment to politics and general levels of regulation. Consequently, two or more countries that are more closely associated in the eyes of consumers than other developed countries are regarded in this study as sub-pack members. In summary, the categorization outcomes at the country level give rise to what is referred to in this study as the pack membership cue, which is used by consumers to evaluate the food systems of pack or sub-pack members. Along the line of reasoning followed by Lee and Ganesh (1999), inferences based on the pack membership cue (assumed to be made at a lower level of cognition) may supersede those based on the country of origin cue.