PRICE PERCEPTION AND LONG-TERM PRICE KNOWLEDGE OF BUYERS OF ORNAMENTAL PLANTS IN GERMANY

In recent years, specialized retail stores for flowers and plants more and more have to compete against new distribution channels like food retail stores, especially with respect to pricing and scale effects, in Germany. Many shop managers are convinced that they have to adapt competitors’ prices because of customers’ price-dominated perception of the distributed products. Against this background, it is the target of this study to analyze the long-term price knowledge of customers of ornamental plants in German retail stores. For this purpose, with Pelargonium and Poinsettia two of the most common ornamental potted plants have been chosen as object of investigation. Customers’ price knowledge includes reference prices perceived in long-term memory and is affected by several factors around the product (category) and by the consumer itself (e.g., buying behavior, socio-demographics, buying intention). Additionally, different factors of price perception of the buyers of plants can influence the long-term price knowledge that can be measured by scanning the explicit price recall accuracy of consumers entering the retail store. In our study, 253 customers in six horticultural retail stores were interviewed face-to-face in May and November 2011 concerning aspects of their buying behavior, price perception issues, and their product price estimations related to Pelargonium and Poinsettia. Based on a foregoing literature review of previous studies, the coherency of potential impact factors on the price recall accuracy of the interviewed consumers is analyzed within this paper.