To Trace is to Trust: From Product Traceability to Brand Trust

As consumers become more conscious of and concerned with the ingredients that constitute their products and how their purchases can impact the environment, they are paying more attention to the origin of their products and the process by which these products are made. The present paper examines how merely labelling products as “traceable” to their origin can help brands establish their transparency and build trust between consumers and brands. The concept of tracing products to their origin has gained traction over the last two decades (e.g., knowing where/how the product was made; van Rijswijk and Frewer 2008). Although traceability can evoke thoughts of safety and quality to consumers (van Rijswijk et al. 2008), the ability to trace products does not necessarily provide consumers with actual safety information or the exact production process (Hobbs et al., 2005). Currently, there is little research in the marketing domain of how consumers react to traceability labels and how brands should make use of these labels to build relationships with consumers. Individuals infer that their relationship with a partner is more intimate and close when personal information is divulged (human-to-human interactions: Aron et al. 1997; Laurenceau et al. 1998; human-to-computer: Moon 2013). Similarly, the presence of a traceability label signals the willingness of a brand to disclose information that is typically kept private, allowing consumers to infer that they may have a closer and more trusting relationship with the brand. Further, research on signaling has indicated that consumers infer low store price from price-matching policies (Srivastava and Lurie 2001), suggesting that a mere signal in the absence of factual information can still induce positive evaluations. In addition, consumers feel more confident about products when they know they can retrieve information about them from the Internet (Bhargave et al. 2016). Hence, we propose that in the presence of a traceable label, which gives consumers the option to retrieve information about production origin online, consumers would infer greater transparency of the production process, more positive qualities about the brand and its products, even in the absence of actual information. Five experiments were conducted to confirm this predicted effect.