Analysis of coffee small farmers innovation system in Colombia

William Corredor

Master's thesis

Abstract:

The adverse situation of traditional coffee producers in Colombia has produced the increasing product differentiation, therefore the migration to markets where receive better payments and face minor price volatility from selling their specialty coffee. In this context, the FNC have designed policies to support the farmer to access high-value chains and advertise Colombian geographic origin as a high-quality product, associated with Specialty coffee in the international market. Our main objective was to examine the interaction of coffee certification labels by conducting Social Networks Analysis within the framework of Colombian government export policies and international marketing strategies. The results answer whether the intended governmental communication policy works and whether it is possible to observe already some changes in online communication.We selected their twitter profiles, downloaded al their contacts in twitter and create a social network with the account that link them. From this network, we detected sub-communities and identified influential and observers nodes. The analysis demonstrated that “Café de Colombia” are closer and form a community with Specialty, highlight the importance of communication media and the weak presence of accounts from producer counties among the most influential actors of the network. The findings indicate first that the "Café de Colombia" promotion policy is reflected by associating Colombian coffee as a specialty coffee; second FNC has an opportunity filling this gap with the content demanded by the relational segment. Further research is needed in areas such as Sentiment analysis, Topic modelling, Trend analysis and Visual analytics to understand the network characteristics and strengthen the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Keywords

Marketing, Communication, Social media

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 15. 5. 2020

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: Ing. Jiří Hejkrlík, Ph.D.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences

Master programme / field:
Tropical Agriculture / International Development and Agricultural Economics