A central challenge in global agriculture is harmonizing food production with the indispensable goal of maintaining of ecosystem services (ES). Traditional cultural landscapes (TCL) offer substantial potential for both sustainable food production and the generation of multiple ES. Yet, these agri-food systems are threatened, and boosting their profitability to prevent their decline is a major challenge. This thesis is based on the premise that effective marketing can increase the economic sustainability of agri-food systems like TCL by increasing consumer demand for their products. Thus, the overarching goal of this dissertation is to gain a better understanding of how sustainable marketing can contribute to the support and maintenance of sustainable agri-food systems. By examining consumer perspectives on products from TCL, this work investigates how the marketing of sustainable agri-food system products can be enhanced. The research question is addressed using a three-stage approach. The first study of this thesis provides a conceptional framework which systematically brings together research on products from TCL from different scholarly domains and marketing research. It shows the role of marketing in traditional cultural landscapes. The second study gains in-depth insight into consumer perception, associations, and knowledge of TCL and products from TCL taking a qualitative perspective. This study aims to find out how successful consumer communication can help to increase consumer demand for products from sustainable agri-food system by using orchard meadows (OM) as a widespread European TCL as research object. The third study expands on the results of the qualitative approach and examines which aspects are particularly important in the communication of products from TCL to consumers by analyzing consumers’ WTP. The findings indicate that consumer demand for products from TCL supports these sustainable agri-food systems, highlighting the need for companies to understand and leverage added product attributes to drive sales. Products from TCL offer a combination of hedonic and ethical benefits like healthy ingredients, good taste, naturalness, traditional farming, environmental friendliness, and cultural heritage. By effectively communicating these values in line with consumer needs, companies can improve product perception and customer utility, ultimately increasing demand and fostering their own economic success. Marketing is crucial for boosting demand for sustainable products, thereby ensuring the long-term economic viability of sustainable agri-food systems.
Sophia Matthäa Philipp (Wed,) studied this question.