The OrganiST Project - Recommendations for small and medium organic shops to compete better in the organic market

The paper is based on the OrganiST (Organic Shops in Tübingen) project. Its aim is to develop and discuss marketing strategies for smaller and regionally orientated organic shops in order to stay attractive for their customers. The researched shops are located in Tübingen (South Germany), where we found different categories of small and medium organic shops. The competition on the market for organic food has dramatically increased. In the investigated town, the competition will increase further, because an organic supermarket of a big chain (Alnatura) is going to open soon. Some of the small and medium sized organic shops have come into troubles. They have problems to hold their regular customers and strategies to gain new customers are often lacking. The outcomes and recommendations of OrganiST shall help the shop owners to get aware on possible additional values they can integrate into their marketing strategy. The study will also elaborate some positive, successful examples of (small scale and regional geared) organic marketing tools. The results of the project will be presented at the conference. The used methods are a structured qualitative interview with the shop keepers, a shop audit based on a check list, a consumer questionnaire, a SWOT analysis, marketing mix decisions and a final interview with the shop keepers