The Ethical Consumer

The Ethical Consumer

1. Positive Trends

   • 79% willing to pay more for tea if it = better wages for tea pickers
   • 84% would welcome fairly-traded products
   • 60% ready to boycott products over concerns about ethical standards
   • 67% consider a company's ethical stance when purchasing
   • Consumers are becoming more aware and interested in ethical implications of everyday purchasing

2. Approaches to Studying the Ethical Consumer

   • Bounded Rationality (positivism)
     • Criticisms
       • Choice is rational, choices are made in individual's self-interest, disregards habit, emotion + morals

3. Attitude Behavior Gap

   • Intentions to change attitudes and behavior can be achieved directly or indirectly
     • Direct - awareness campaigns, marketing, energy labels...
     • Indirect - fuel duty, car tax, price on plastic bags...
   • Approaches to Understanding
     • Positivism - emphasizes the objectivity of science and the consumer as a rational decision maker
     • Interpretivism - stresses the subjective meaning of consumer's individual experience and the idea that any behavior is subject to multiple interpretations rather than one single explanation e.g. presence of environmental factors
   • Value Attitude Theory - Expectancy
     • My attitude towards an object is the sum of my beliefs about its characteristics, weighted by my evaluations of those characteristics
     • Problems
       • Reliance on the core assumptions (1) individuals are the best judge of what is best for them, (2) when individuals maximise their own utility, societal utility will also be maximised
   • Reasons for reported attitude behavior gaps
     • Variables other than attitude that can exert a strong influence of behavior
     • Inaccurate measurement of attitudes + behavior
   • Example
     • Maximisers will try to make the perfect decision every time (stressful) whereas satisfyers will aim for decisions that are good enough (happier)
   • Convenience + speed + price can bound our rationality - may be necessary to comply with our ethical stance
   • Neutralization - a way to deal with breaking of ethical conduct (justifying actions e.g. through denial to minimize cognitive dissonance)

4. The Consumer's Dilemma (Tom Fishburne)

   • Consumers feel the need (or social norms + pressures) to shop ethically, think through environmental implications of purchasing
     • Conversely, the consumer may also feel the need to look out for personal self-interest e.g. during a recession favoring cost over ethics

5. Political Consumption

   • Invidualised collective action
   • "Boycotts and buycotts reflect the expression of attitudes and values about issues of justice, fairness or non-economic issues that concern personal and family well-being and ethical or political assessment of favorable or unfavorable business + government practice"
     • "the choice among producers and products with the goal of changing institutional or market practices that one finds ethically or politically objectionable" (Micheletti, Follesdal + Stolle, 2004)
   • Buycott
     • Definition
       • The opposite of a boycott. Deliberately purchasing a company's or country's products in support of their policies or to counter a boycott.
         • E.g. can be used as consumer voice / protest / voting
     • Objectives
       • Act against dominant corporate forces in pursuit of social betterment
       • Individual motives (well-being, health, acting socially desirable manner)
       • Social motives (ethical / environmental concerns)
       • Fulfilling self-expression in search for morality
       • Enacting a functional change in a company's marketing mix / enacting structural change in the entire system of marketing and commerce

6. Consumption as Voting

   • "the market is a democracy where every penny gives the right to vote" (Fetter 1907)
   • "Everyone who goes into a shop and chooses one article instead of another is casting a vote in the economic ballot box: with thousands or millions of others that choice is signaled through to production and investment and helps to mold the world just a tiny fraction nearer to people's desire" (Powell 1969)

7. Consumer Sovereignty

   • Defintion
     • Is a market situation where consumers have the power to ultimately decide which products and servicessociety will produce and consumer (consumer is kind) (Garman, 1997)
     • In short, consumers are not sovereign but one can refer to a degree of sovereignty enhanced by choice, information and retailer assessment, but restricted by limitations of competition, actions by te sate and individual wealth (Smith 1990)
   • Challenges
     • Choice, Information, Wealth, Conflicting + Uncertain Votes
     • Does 'voting' in the market system communicate consumers' concerns to producers and retailers as well?
     • To what extent, if any, should businesses pander to the ethical concerns of some of their consumers? In what ways might the threat of ethical consumption be turned into an opportunity?
     • Difficult to know why sales are dropping; not necessarily that brand is being avoided, it could be changing consumer tastes / trends