Wine cooperatives and quality clues: a choice experiment on European consumers

Wine cooperatives, and agricultural cooperatives in general, have long been negatively judged by consumers, practitioners and researchers (Elster, 1989). Multiple drawbacks of the cooperative models have been investigated, such as agent and incentive problems (Hakelius and Hansson, 2016, Valette et al., 2018), limited ability to scale up (Tortia et al., 2013), slow adaptation to changes in market conditions (Nilsson, 1997). In addition to these structural issues, the assumption of lower quality, reflected by lower price point, has resulted in the poor reputation of wine cooperatives (Schamel, 2015). Furthermore, Garrido (2022) affirms that the low-quality standards conventionally associated to wine cooperatives are a direct consequence of their inability to avoid opportunistic behaviors of their members. Nevertheless, cooperatives still exist, and a growing number of scholars has been highlighting strengths and advantages of this organizational model (Fahlbeck, 2007; Figueredo and Franco, 2018; Valentinov, 2007). In spite of the positive reinterpretation of the cooperative model by scholars, there is no clear consensus over consumers’ judgement of wine cooperatives and their products, and the literature on this topic is fairly limited. On the one hand, some studies confirm that negative prejudice towards wine cooperatives still exists, in particular among European consumers (Pennerstorfer and Weiss, 2012; Sáenz-Navajas et al., 2013). Wine cooperatives are recurringly cited as unable to pursue branding and differentiation strategies (Bonroy et al., 2019; Grashuis, 2018) and catch-up consumers’ growing demand for high quality and variety (Carbone, 2021): this may explain why a non negligeable share of consumers negatively judge the cooperative wine label for all the price segments (Rebelo et al., 2019). On the other hand, some scholars point out a trend reversal. European consumers are apparently shifting towards more positive opinions on cooperatives and the wines they produce, as confirmed by quantitative studies performed in Germany (Dreyer, 2019) and Italy (Schamel, 2014). Furthermore, according to recent literature, the adoption of optimal communication and branding strategies is beneficial for the image of wine cooperatives (Bernal-Jurado et al., 2021; Di Vita et al., 2019; Raza and Thomas, 2018). To the best of our knowledge, while the literature provides multiple examples of Choice Experiments (CE) to study preferences for various attributes and quality clues of wine, only one study has used this methodology to investigate interest in wine from cooperatives among French consumers (Sáenz-Navajas et al., 2013). To fulfill this gap and better understand the opinion on wine cooperatives among Europeans, we developed a CE and used a multi-country longitudinal design to analyze consumers’ preferences for wine labels and specific quality clues. A Computer Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) survey and the CE were forwarded to a non-probability sample of 3600 wine consumers in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Slovenia and the UK, stratified by age, gender and geographical origin. As highlighted by our results, while negative prejudice towards wine cooperatives and their products still persists, more and more consumers embrace the idea that cooperatives might compete not only on price but also on quality. In this sense, communication based on adequate use of labelling and adoption of quality certifications might strengthen the image of wine cooperatives which focus on quality. As wine consumers evolve and become more demanding on intrinsic quality as well as the wine and the winemakers’ identity, history and connection with the territory, cooperatives could further stress their uniqueness: their wines are not only the result of the interaction between man and nature, but also the best expression of a whole local community, embedded and rooted in its territory.