Evaluating Consumer Willingness‐to‐Pay for State Marketing Program Branded Products: An Eye Tracking Study

ABSTRACT State marketing programs (SMPs) assist in‐state producers with marketing their products to consumers through the creation of brands. To evaluate the effectiveness of these programs, we utilized a discrete choice experiment (DCE) combined with eye‐tracking to estimate consumers' willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for tomatoes and tomato transplants displaying Tennessee's (TN) state managed Pick TN Products (PTP) logo. A 2023 in‐lab DCE eye‐tracking experiment was used to collect data under one of three conditions: a control, a local benefit information treatment (text based), or an image oriented farm connection treatment. Data from 145 consumers were analyzed using mixed logit models. The PTP logo, compared to the products being declared “out of state,” heirloom varieties, and red color, compared to orange, generated premiums regardless of product type (i.e., tomatoes, tomato transplants). For both products, the treatments increased WTP for PTP logoed items. Together, this suggests that SMPs help farmers market local products especially when coupled with additional promotional information.