Examining the role of regional culture and geographical distances on the representation of unfamiliar foods in a continental-size country

This study provides an experimental-exploratory investigation about the role of regional culture and Euclidean distances on the consumers’ representation of edible insects in Brazil, a country with an extensive geographical surface. Seven hundred and eighty participants were recruited on the streets of eight cities from different Brazilian states: Manaus in Amazonas; Porto Velho in Rondônia; Macapá in Amapá; Cuiabá in Mato Grosso; Aracaju in Sergipe; Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro; Campinas in São Paulo; and Santa Maria in Rio Grande do Sul. These participating cities were considered from their cultural identity differences and geographical distances. Through a continual restricted word association task, participants were instructed to promptly verbalize the first five terms that came to their minds when stimulated with the expression “food made with edible insects”. Following, they had to score the valence of each term they produced. The dictionaries produced in each city were compared and classified into groups using the Ellegård’s index. Each group presented distinct ways of expression and attitude with respect to the inductive expression. Basically, Brazil was divided into two main groups according to their representation of edible insects: one consisted by the cities situated near the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, which present a cultural formation influenced by the European immigrants; and the other comprised the cities from the continental region that have strong cultural influence from the Amerindians. Thus, the cultural formation was more decisive to explain the similar representations among the cities than their geographical proximity. Given that, to effectively introduce a novel food in a country with varied regional culture, the marketing strategy should be focused on the values and beliefs of their culture subgroups instead of a single strategy for the whole country.