Methods to Increase the Brand Trust in Green Food on the Basis of Customer Perceived Value

With the increasing development of scientific technology and social economy, more and more consumers have paid attention to the green food and purchase it. However, consumers have thrown their doubts on green food recently since the problems of food safety are constantly exposed. Having finished the document research, the paper has firstly studied the consumer perceived value of green food and then analyzed the status of consumers’brand trust of green food. Finally, the upgrading of the green food’s brand trust has been put forward.


INTRODUCTION
Fased with the fierece brand competition, companies must build and keep long-term and effective relations with customers to win its competition advantages (Gummenson, 1998).Moreover, it is the brand trust that connects the consumers and brand as the core part (Hiscock, 2001).According to the investigation, customers will show a dependent willingness on a brand when they trust a brand, which will result in the customers'repeat purchase, the transmission of its positive information, the prevention of others'negative views on this brand and even inciting others to purchase the brand (Amine, 1998).Therefore, more and more companies are constantly employing the brand relations marketing with the hope of increasing consumers' brand perceived values, because consumers will have a preference and trust in this brand by this way.
With the increasing development of scientific technology and social economy, the theory of green food consumption has attracted more and more consumers who both want to have good meals but also prefer to the healthy and green diets.Therefore, under the philosophy of the healthy lifestyle, consumers' purchase for green food has been changed from the past experience to the branded choice.However, consumers have thrown their doubts on green food recently since the problems of food safety are constantly exposed, such as, the chemicals as pesticide, hormone leading to the death, our ecological environments has been deteriorated and the atmosphere, water and farms have been polluted in a worse way.So, what will be the most important obstacles in the process of promotion is the brand trust of green food.Obviously, if the companies want to overstep the gap, they must learn to change the position, consider the process of the recognition, attitude, willingness and purchase of green food.And the companies should take it for the judgment standards of green food and improve itself to meet the consumers' needs.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The green food and green marketing: Complying with the principle of sustainable development, the green food is a safe and high grade nutrition kind food without environment pollution after a certain mode of production, which is allowed to use the green food label certificated by the specialized agency.Things related with the environmental protection are normally labeled with green internationally.In order to outstand this kind of food from a good ecological environment, it is named green food (Qing, 2013).The green food in China is divided into degree A and degree AA.The green food in degree A means that the limited uses of chemical synthenic fertilizers, agricultural chemicals and other substances harmful to the environment and health are permitted in the production; And the green food in degree AA equals to the organic food.
The green marketing, as an integrated concept, was proposed in 1980s and emerged in 1990s.The core is that the green marketing is one mode of business operation giving feedbacks to the ecology human beings are concerned, which is chosen and determined the strategy of marketing organization according to the environment protection and ecology principles and is based on the green technology, green markets and green economy.What the green marketing emphasizes and studies is the companies should adpat to the consumer's needs and how the company's adpat to the consumers growing needs for the environmental friendly goods.Therefore, the green marketing requires the companies to put the socail benefits and ecological benefits in an important place, so that the impactful combination of economic benefit, social benefit and ecological benefit can lead to the green benefit.The green project in China dated from the development of green food and the green food marketing is the driving force to develop the green food.Through the production of green food and the propaganda of green marketing, it can fully present the responsibility of the green food companies to the ecology and the society and can show the security of the green foods brought to the consumers' health, thus building the companies good images and improving its markets competition for the promotion of green food's production.
The theory of customer perceived value: Recently, the theory of customer perceived value has been widely used on the aspects of improving company's competitiveness and predicting customers'purchase behavior.Moreover, it is deemed to be one of the most important project in 21 st century.
Drucker once pointed out in 1980s, "the real meaning of marketing lies in understanding what is valuable to customers."Scholarsgenerally believe that value is the one customers can get from the products rather than the one manufacturers made in the products.Zeithaml (1988) is the scholar earlier researching customer perceived value, who firstly answered the psychological mechanism of customers perceiving the value from products.He viewed that customer perceived value is a kind of psychological reflection of balancing the perceived benefits and perceived costs while customers are purchasing.Wbodruff (1977) put forward that customer perceived value are included the product and service attributes customers perceived, the preferences and the preference and judgement to the final results (Li, 2014).Kotler (1999) proposed the theory of Customer transfer value, which he identified customers were always persueing the least cost and most value while choosing the products and services.Customer transfer value is mainly consist of the overall customer values and the overall customer costs: customer value including the products value, service value, personnel value and image value; customer costs containing monetary cost, time cost, physical cost and mental cost.

The theory of brand trust:
Trust is a prevention mechanism and economization tool, which aims to reduce the complexity and risks.While determining to what extent a party exchange the relations, trust is able to promote both cooperations.Hiscock (2001) though the final gold of marketing is to establish a solid relations between the consumers and brands, which main elements of this relation is the trust.Brand Trust was put forward by Howard and Sheth (1969) firstly, who believed the trust is one of the decesive factors of purchase intentions.Brand trust is that consumers show their confidence to a brand among a number of brands.Even if the brand has faced with the risks, consumers are still inclined to count on this brand.As far as the dimensions of brand trust are concerned, the great majority of the scholars are widely in agreement with its multi-dimensions.The brand trust of green food applied in this study is divided into three dimensions, which consists of the Quality trust, Benevolence trust and Reputation trust.The quality trust refers to the consumers' trust to the brand quality; The benevolence trust means that consumers believe in the brand who will consider consumers interests on all aspects and will never lie to them; Brand reputation indicates that consumers hold their views on the brands' expressive ability and reliability.Good reputation is the key point for consumers to have confidence in a brand and also can enable the brand to have better effective transmission among the consumers.Therefore, if a brand has a good reputation, consumers will have confidence in the brand quickly without getting any judgements from others or other channels.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The consumer perceived value of green food: The core competitiveness of a company stems from the consumers' recognition of products and services.Once companies can provide much more perceived value for consumers, it can win brand trust, consumers' satisfaction and loyality to enhance the products' competitiveness.Viewed from the customer perceived value, consumers' choice for green good are mainly determined after balancing the perceived benefits and perceived costs.In the consumer behavior of green food, perceived benefits make up of product value, image value and social value.Product value: since green food are chosen by consumers voluntarily to purchase, the purpose of the consumers buying the green food is to hope what they have bought is pollution-free, natural and safe.That is why they are particularly focus on the products quality.Image value: the green food can be distinguished from other ordinary food in packages and labels, which are shown with certain shapes to indicate the green food are safe and pollution-free food from the purified and decent ecological environments.Consumers are going to choose and differentiate the green food by brands or labels.Social value: Green food advocates health and environmental protection, so the consumers purchasing green food usually present their care on their health, their attentions on the healthy and safe diets and their wishes to improve their living quality.Moreover, the perceived costs mainly consist of the monetary cost determined by the products price and the mental cost produced by the information reliability.After the consumers experiences of the green food buying and using, the satisfaction will be generated when the perceived benefits far outweigh the perceived Fig. 1: Customer perceived value of green food costs, which will gradually turn out the consumers' trust on a brand (Fig. 1).
The status of consumers' brand trust of green food: Low quality trust: Recently, some famous brands such as Sanlu, Shuanghui, etc who have prapagated their green idea produced the food which seriously endangered consumers' health.And Walmart once was reported the common pork was sold out by the prices of green port to reap huge profits.What all this happen made consumers doubt whether the green food are produced in a green way or not, all in all, consumers are unable to visit the companies' production base and have no idea about the overall production process, so they are normally skeptical about whether the green food they bought are reall ones or not.Some consumers will adopt the principle of minimum loss to choose the lower ordinary food under the circumstances of information asymmetric.Even more some consumers are totally distrust the green food, since they think green food are no more than a stunt and they are safe after eating the vegetables with pesticucte for more than ten years.
Benevolence trust hard to build: Under the incidents of unsafe food repeatedly happening, some consumers hold the belief that green food is just the marketing tools for some companies.Moreover, the high pricing makes the consumers believe that the companies are pursuing the profit maximazation rather than considering the consumers benefits, otherwise, how could the safety problems of green food appear more frequently without any end.More importantly, many a food manufacturer has got less recognition of the benevolence trust and has no idea about how the building of consumers' benevolence trust will make the positive influence on the companies in the long-term way.
Brand reputation damaged: Nowadays, our green food branded is in a relatively low level and more seriously the large brands and famous companies are not numerous.Because of the shortage of money, it is hard for some middle-sized and small-smized companies to set up their images with capital to be invested.At the same time, with the random inspection of the milk products from the famous companies Yili and Mengniu below the basic standards, the sense of identity and trust of consumers to Food Corporation drastically reduced.Under the safety problems of food occurring many times, the doubts and worries consumers have to the food are spreading to the fields of green food and even hurt the integrated brand reputation of green food to be destroyed.

CONCLUSION
If green food corporations want to upgrade the consumers' brand trust, they should firstly improve consumers' satisfaction from customer's percieved value.So the upgrading of green food's brand trust should carry out from two aspects: one is to improve the consumers perceived benefits; the other is to reduce consumer's perceived costs.
Stand out the product value of "green and safe" to improve consumers' quality trust: Owing to a series of food safety problems reported, consumers are worried about whether the green food is green and wehther it is pollution-free or not.Consequently, it is crucial for green food enterprises to guarantee the products quality.High-quality green food not only need to choose nonpollution and non-hazard production or processed base but also need the strict supervision on producing process and need the production procedure strictly obeying to the requirements of green food.In order to enhance the brand trust of consumers, the green food enterprises must apply for the green products label and the packages must adopt the green color (Wang and Zhou, 2015).

Strengthen the image value of "authentic green" to break down the barriers of benevolence trust:
The company with positive and favorable image can raise the consumers' confidence in the company and its products, meanwhile can decrease consumers' psychological purchase risks.Green food brand wants to win in the fierce brands competition; consumers must be made to recognize that the branded green food is the real, authentic green food.Consequently, green food enterprises should conduct more propaganda and enlarge more investment on advertisements communication to make consumers understand the green food and make consumers yearn for green consumption, since the company and its products with high exposure attracts consumers' favour more easily.
The empirical research conducted by Professor He et al. (2009) from Hunan University has testified the cause-related marketing has remarkably positive effects on consumers' brand trust and purchasing intentions.Obviously, green food enterprises should give publicity and portray the enterprises' image of "authentic green" by all kinds of public welfare activities.Combined with themes of related concepts of green products, (such as the topics of health, caring for living, etc.), the green food enterprises should fully emphasize the "green and environmental" brand culture and connotation during the image building and propaganda to rebuild the brand reputation, credibility and integrity and the "green and healthy" brand image, which will help to break down the barriers of benevolence trust with the good public praise formed.
Design the specialized channels to cut down the customers perceived costs: Since the demands of green food are mainly from the high-end markets, the consumers prefer to the brands with larger market shares or with the sales distribution more up markets rather than spending too much time and energy to make the decisions among different brands of green food in the process of purchase.There is no doubt that the company with strong abilities in marketing channels will naturally occupy a great majority of the markets and that the specialized channels can reduce customers perceived costs on time and energy.Therefore, it is necessary to adopt the diversified channel models to improve brand image with the enhancement of high exposure and specialized channels.According to the above two factors, the channel design of green food should contain the following models.Firstly, it is to establish the directly-managed store.To set up separately, the directly-managed store can be opened in the residential areas and nearby the famrer's markets more prosperous.Especially for the green agricultural products, it can not only decrease the distribution costs but also reach the end-users in a short time so that the freshness of the green agricultural products can be increased.Secondly, to set up special counters in the higher level of supermarkets, the green food should be distingushied from the common food.Then the special counters of green food can be set up in the ordinary supermarkets step by step, which can cut down the consumers time cost effectively.Thirdly, it is essential to establish an official website, since the realization of online arms can satisfy the market needs in relatively undeveloped channels.
Attach importance to consumers experience to increase consumers satisfaction: A great number of surveys show that consumers experience can achieve good brand effects, so to attach importance to consumers experience is the basis to improve consumers satisfaction and promote the brand trust.First of all, each directly-managed store should keep a consistent design style to make sure consumers can be enjoyable in shopping experience at every stores.Meanwhile, the storefront renovation can play the role of image propaganda.In the next place, it is required to open the production base of green food enterprises and encourage consumers to visit at their own expenses, or select out the consumers representatives at intervals to invite their visit to the companies with the free shuttle services, because the open of production base and consumers experience can enhance the brand trust.At last, aftersale experience should be strengthened, so the cooking of green food and the cooking training can be held regularly at the directly-managed stores and the methods sharing on how to identify the green food with consumers can also be made.