The Social Construction of Consumer Trust in Food: An Exploration of Infant Formula Consumption in Urban China

Abstract

Consumer trust in food has become a global concern due to the worldwide occurrences of food safety incidents in the past decades. Despite the growing scholarly interest in trust in the area of marketing and food consumption, little work has addressed how consumers respond to and make sense of the fast-changing food reality in relation to the establishment and development of consumer trust in food under a suspicious atmosphere in contemporary society. To address this gap, this thesis explores the dynamics of consumer trust in food within the context of infant formula consumption in urban China from a social constructionist approach. More specifically, this research explores the factors that are involved in the building and development of trust by addressing how these factors influence consumer trust in food individually and collectively over the course of infant formula consumption. Taking a social constructionist epistemology and adopting hermeneutics as the methodology, this research employed qualitative in-depth interviews to collect longitudinal data from a group of Chinese mothers before and after giving birth in relation to how they choose, purchase, and consume infant formula. The findings reveal that food regulations of multiple countries, personal relationships, and food brands/products are the major factors that influence consumer trust in food, in the forms of institutional, interpersonal, and brand trust. Prior to actual consumption, institutional assurance by food regulations and experience sharing from trusted acquaintances compensate for the lack of direct interaction with target infant formula brands and products to enable a certain level of initial trust. Then personal experience with the brand and product after consumption may develop this initial trust in three different directions according to post-consumption experience and satisfaction. Based on empirical findings, a social construction framework is proposed to depict the individual and collective influence of these factors on the establishment and development of consumer trust in food. The thesis sheds light on extant knowledge of trust in food with a social constructionist approach to integrating relational factors both within and outside the micro consumer-food dyad to a more comprehensive macro landscape. The proposed social construction framework of building trust also provides practical implications to food industry players as well as policy makers at both domestic and international levels to address the growing public concern of trust in food.