In what way is societal trends and consumers’ perceived definition of animal welfare expressed in retailers’ store assortment?

This paper presents an overview of the social responsible performing in food retailing in Sweden. From what is to be found, in the Sweden cases the reactive versus proactive strategies are very much on the corporate agenda today to strengthen the retail corporate brand and to gain competitive advantage. All the same the Swedish food retailers in general seem to act reactive rather than proactive, as market driven rather than market driving in terms of Kumar et al (2000). However, some of the retailers are indicating a market driving behaviour, by profiling themselves in taking action on animal welfare issues. The strategies on social responsibility lie within the brand equity. By loading their retailer own brand platform with social responsibility together with the fact that their private brands is now becoming more advanced towards the fourth generation of private brand (Burt 2000) loaded with animal concerns and social responsibility. The results in a quite recently Swedish study show that the retailers’ private brand can have as strong and sometimes even stronger position regarding to social responsibility than some of the national brands (Stadeus et al 2004). Using a qualitative approach, the aim of this paper is to open up for a discussion on in what way the Swedish retailers adjust their marketing strategies to the consumer’s perceived emotive aspects on food consumption on the context of animal welfare. A discussion concerning the "old" normative case where companies act reactively on legislations and social obligation to society and how that is about to change due to an increased NGO's activity and the increasing critical dialogue in society among the stakeholders of the firms.