Good practices for improving promotion and sales for Romanian ecological agricultural products

Abstract

Nowadays, life is an uninterrupted discovery. The consumers tend to have a healthier lifestyle, with a diet that has optimal nutritional values, to maintain their health, in harmony with the nature and the environment. Thus, marketing is selling dreams, impressions, perceptions, creating the opportunity to live through a unique experience, to help the customers write their own story, not just to satisfy them. The main objective of this research is to find ways to support promotion and sales of ecological producers in agriculture. Producers offer high quality products, with no artificial additives and contribute to the protection of the biodiversity and the environment, and implicitly of our health. The exploratory research represents the main purpose of this paper. Starting from the analysis of the literature review related with ecological agricultural market, the evolution of the custo-mer’s behavior and the identification of the components of the promotional mix, an overview is established. The in depth interviews and the analysis of international models show that informing the producers regarding the consumer’s dynamic needs (product diversity and freshness, adaptability to the market demand, online orders, home delivery, the client feedback, the possibility to return goods, to process their own products etc.), openness to associations and collaborations on horizontal and vertical axes, communication and information campaigns, the  multi-functionality of farms, proactive promoting, creating a cluster structure are among the key factors to improve sales and promotion