The image of Agriculture in Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, Cristina
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Outros Autores: Côrte-Real, Ana, Lencastre, Paulo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25233
• topic: Brand; Response; Associations; Publics; Agriculture

Presently the brand concept can range from personal brand to country or continent brand. We therefore consider that studying a sector of the economy, in this case Agriculture, according to the brand concept would be an added value. Agriculture is a key sector in any economy. Its main function is to guarantee food supply for the population, but it is also important its part on territory order and environment protection Starting from the importance Agriculture has in any country, we wanted to understand the image this sector has among the general public. The goal of this investigation is to characterize the image of Agriculture in Portugal, based on the associations it provokes. Associations are the purest way of obtaining the image of a brand, for they let us understand which is the positioning of a brand in the mind of its publics. Method: The present investigation follows an epistemological continuum, starting from an exploratory study of a qualitative approach (brainstorming), with the aim of obtaining a group of associations to the Agriculture sector by the general public, and then using a quantitative approach in order to generalize de results. The data has been analyzed based on the SPSS through a multidimensional unfolding analysis. Results:It was with no surprise that we verified that the image of Agriculture in Portugal is bad, translated by a group of not so favourable associations, demonstrating that it is not the pertinence of the sector that makes it attractive. Conclusions: So we conclude that the pertinence of an extremely important sector as Agriculture does not necessarily bring with it strong and favourable associations among the general public. Since Agriculture is a sector of priority concern in the context of the European Union, we consider it pertinent to replicate this study at an european level in order to understand which is the image of Agriculture in the different countries of the European Union. This type of study allows to base communication actions with the aim of altering the image of Agriculture, a fundamental sector for human life and environmental sustainability.