THE CONTRIBUTION OF WEB COMMUNICATION TO AGRI-FOOD SMES COMPETITIVENESS. A COMPARISON BETWEEN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH SPEAKING WEBSITES

The development of Web 2.0 lead to an evolution in the Enterprise – Customerrelationship, allowing the latter to access a wide range of information with a growingimportance in the purchaseprocess. Enterprises – particularly the small ones – havebeenrequired to use the web with greaterawareness and a sense of observation to deal with consumers’ empowerment and to generatesustainable benefits to both the territorial and business systems. In the light of these considerations, this study aims at highlighting the contribution of web communication to agri-food Small and Medium Enterprises’ (SMEs’) competitiveness and atanalysing agri-foodSMEs’ web communication patterns. In line with these goals, a fieldresearchon Italian- and English-language websites has been conducted to identify the essential determinants in the "brand-land-product" web communicationaswellas the most common verbal contents adopted by agri- foodSMEs and their transmission through the Internet. Managerial implications are indicated in the possibility for Mediterranean agri-food business SMEs to acquiredeepersemantic and lexical expertises in communicating their products on the web, in support of their competitiveness, by filling the gap between their opportunities and capabilities to compete on the global scene