TESTING THE QUALITY-PRICE RELATIONS IN PARMIGIANO AND PADANO CHEESE MARKETS

The purpose of this article was to prove the existence of quality-price relations among Parmigiano and Padano Cheese markets and explain their consequences in terms of marketing strategies using the quality as a Factor to affect the customer's choices at different market levels. A statistica! analysis, based on cointegration and Granger causality, was used to test the existence of these relations within the chain and across the two chains. The results suggested the evidence of cross price cointegration hetween Parmigiano and Padano prices at the wholesale market level, but this condition was not confirmed when testing the chain cointegration between wholesale and retail market levels for the same product. The conclusion was that at the wholesale level, the commerciai quality of Padano led the market and thè pricing stratcgy was dictated by thè Padano's operators. Bctwecn wholesale and retail, there was not a clear quality-price leadership effect in both the Parmigiano and Padano markets. At the retail market level, the effect of marketing mix strategies of a large chain targeted to maximize the sales of both products using different strategies faded the effect of the industrial quality.