As an intermediary between the producing farms and consumers, companies, including those in the food industry, have an important position in the value chain alongside retailers. The food industry therefore plays a key role in the question of which biodiversity-promoting raw materials become products and how these are marketed. A few studies have already been conducted on the role of biodiversity in the decision-making behavior of consumers. The decisions of companies, on the other hand, have hardly been examined so far. A second gap in research lies in storytelling: companies can use storytelling as a communication tool in marketing, and consumers can make these stories their own, absorb them, change them and pass them on to position themselves in their social environment. Storytelling as a tool to promote biodiversity awareness in the context of environmental education has already been studied, but not yet in the marketing context.
The dissertation project addresses these research gaps with the following research questions:
- How do marketing professionals see biodiversity as a possible part of their product and communication strategies?
- What are marketers' perceptions of the importance of biodiversity for their customer groups and how are marketing decisions related to biodiversity made in organizational multi-person decision-making processes?
- Which narratives about biodiversity exist and which ones can be particularly well linked to consumer decisions by consumers?
