What Makes a Good Agricultural Story? Validation of a Scale for Marketing and Communication

Abstract

Agricultural communication covers all kinds of human communications involving agriculture, food, natural resources and rural interests. Such communications exchange and deliver the information of the agricultural and natural resource industries to the right receivers through effective media. Storytelling in marketing is also a managerial application; it is a marketing strategy that includes the agricultural industry. While an increasing number of agricultural businesses are promoting the application of agricultural stories in marketing and facilitating increases in the consumption of agricultural products, few researchers have explicitly developed valid tools for measuring the constructs of agricultural stories. This study continued previous research on effective model of storytelling in agricultural marketing, with the aim of exploring the constructs of a good agricultural story and developing the “Agricultural Story Scale” to measure them. Thirteen items measuring three factors—authenticity, narrative, and protagonist’s distinctiveness—were confirmed to have satisfactory structural model fit. The findings of the study and recommendations that contribute to both theoretical and practical implications are reported.

Keywords

• agricultural story
• agricultural communication
• measurement
• storytelling
• storytelling in marketing