MARKETING & SUSTAINABILITY
Understanding the Sustainable Consumer: Market Segmentation
Consumers are driven by a wide variety of motivations, needs, and interests when making purchasing decisions. However, marketing research has revealed that there are certain categories, or “segments”, of consumers based on reported preferences and actual buying behavior.
To improve impacts on people and planet, marketers need to understand the segments of sustainable consumers.
A brief word on the “attitude-behavior gap”. If we ask people what they think they would do (attitude), often their answer is different than what they actually do (behavior). Some customer segmentation is done based on attitudinal surveys whereas other approaches involve evaluation of actual buying behavior. Keep this attitude-behavior gap phenomenon in mind; people don’t always say what they do.
Here we will draw mainly from Silvia Sarti, Nicole Darnall, and Francesco Testa’s “Market segmentation of consumers based on their actual sustainability and health-related purchases” (2018).
Three Customer Segments: Collectivists, Individuals, and Indifferents
Marketers creates customer segments in order to better align the marketing mix with the preferences and needs of a particular segment. Segmentation can be done at different scales from the general, like an entire industry (e.g. social media user segments), to specific, such as for a particular product (e.g. TikTok user segments). It can also be done for demographic groups (e.g. Millenial Latinas) or for geographic areas (e.g. a particular Canadian province, a U.S. state, or African country).
In sustainability, there have been market segments developed for food, fashion, transportation, and much more. To illustrate the importance of segmentation, and how marketers can use it to advance sustainability, here we segment sustainability consumers in general without focusing on a particular industry or type of purchase. Finally, keep in mind, that although we won’t get into it here, very important differences exist along gender, race/ethnicity, and age lines to name just a few identity categories.
According to the authors Sarti, Darnall, and Testa, there are three main customer segments: collectivists, individualists and indifferents. Each differs in their expressed support and preference for public benefits (social equity and ecological), private benefits (health), and public/private benefits (organic and vegan).
Collectivist
Collectivists spend the most of their total purchase on sustainability and health-related labeled products. In the study, they were also much more likely to spend money on “public benefit” products which had labels indicating the product was addressing social equity and environmental problems in the sourcing, production and perhaps even its packaging.
Collectivists are shopping for the greater good.
Individualist
Individualists also spend part of their total purchase on sustainability and health-related labeled products. However, they proportionately purchased more private benefit–or health-related–products than the collectivists. Individualists did show a preference for some public benefit products (mostly ecological and organic) but clearly appear to be driven mostly to take care of their own health and wellness.
Individualists are shopping for their greater good.
Indifferent
Indifferents spend very little of their total purchase amount on sustainability and health-related labeled products. Some preference for “private benefit” (health labeled) products and for organically labelled items.
Indifferents are shopping.
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