A best–worst measure of attitudes toward buying seabream and seabass products: an application to the island of Gran Canaria

Abstract

Attitudes are important key drivers that affect consumers’ seafood consumption. The present investigation used a best–worst scaling approach to measure the level of importance and satisfaction of consumers’ attitudes towards the purchase of seabream and seabass in Gran Canaria (Spain). The investigation also compared the results of the best–worst scaling (BWS) approach with those of the traditional Likert-scale method and offers a different perspective of the results using an Importance–Satisfaction Analysis (ISA). The results indicate that the most important attributes concerned the hygiene and safety of the product, the health benefits, the freshness, the taste and the nutrients. At the same time, these attributes were ranked as those which satisfied consumers the most. However, some of the results obtained from the methodologies differed. The results suggest that, in the Likert-scale task, respondents might be overstating the importance and satisfaction of the attributes; while in the BWS, consumers were forced to evaluate a trade-off in the selection of the best and worst attributes in each scenario, so the task impeded, in principle, to define every attribute as very important and providing a high satisfaction. As a result, we consider that BWS offers more reliable and clearer results than traditional Likert-scale experiments.