Sustainable consumer behaviour

Sustainable consumer behaviour is consumers’ behaviors that improve social and environmental performance as well as meet their needs. It studies why and how consumers do or do not incorporate sustainability issues into their consumption behaviour. Also, it studies what products consumers do or do not buy, how they use them and what they do with them afterwards. One mechanism to spread information about sustainable consumer behaviour is word of mouth.

From a conventional marketing perspective, consumer behaviour has focused largely on the purchase stage of the total consumption process. This is because it is the actual point at which a contract is made between the buyer and seller, money is paid and the ownership of products transfers to the consumer. Yet from a social and environmental perspective, consumer behaviour needs to be understood as a whole since a product affects all stages of a consumption process.

Need and want recognition occur when a consumer senses a difference between what he or she perceives to be the idea versus the actual state of affairs.

There are three key sources for searching information, in other words personal, commercial and public sources. Especially, the mass media, which is a public source, increasingly provide information about the environmental costs and benefits of consumption. Consumers become aware of them through these sources.

In this stage, environmental concerns which are expressed as environmental costs, risks and benefits, will contribute to the evaluation of options in deciding what to buy. One way to evaluate more sustainable consumption is to consider the total customer cost which incurs in acquisition, use and post-use phases.

Consumers have to trade off the environmental benefits against other attributes such as higher price, better performance and better design. In addition they may need to change the manner of behaviour that they usually do.

In this stage, maintenance, repair, use frequency and type of use are of interest. Some key products such as homes, cars and domestic appliances, much of the sustainability impact accrue after the purchase phase during use or post-use. Again, this is why the total consumption process approach is needed.

In the final stage, consumers can keep, reuse (for example by selling, trading or giving a product to others) and dispose of a product. Some materials such as paper, glass, metal can be recycled or reused in production process. This phase has become significantly important due to the overloaded landfill.

...
Wikipedia