Who Are Sustainable Conscious Consumers? A Segmentation Approach to Identify and Profile Patterns of Un-/Sustainable Conscious Consumers.

Research Question Previous studies often used a one-dimensional operationalization of isolated aspects of sustainable consumption (e.g. environmentalism) that underestimates the importance of other dimensions in consumer perceptions (Simpson and Radford 2012) and fail to measure consumers' different types of consciousness or perceived relevance (Hanss and Böhm 2012). Moreover, marketing research far too often equates conceptually different segments such as socially responsible and ecologically conscious consumers. As the CSC model accounts for these considerations (Balderjahn et al. 2013), a segmentation-identification of different patterns of sustainable consciousness-based on this approach should provide us with a greater understanding of (un-)sustainable consumers. To this end, we aim to answer the research question: Are there distinct segments of sustainable consumers that focus on different consciousness patterns of sustainability? Method and Data To address whether specific sustainability-conscious consumer groups exist and how and to what extent human values, socio-demographic characteristics and behavioral intentions differ between these groups, we used validated scales for CSC (Balderjahn et al.'s (2013), human values (Schwartz et al. 2001) and impulsive buying (Edwards 1993; Ridgway, Kukar-Kinney and Monroe 2008). Single items were used to measure purchasing intensities for eco-friendly and fair trade products, and a sum score of 11 selected products for product possession. After confirming the psychometric properties of the CSC measurement model (conducting principal component exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach's α, and confirmatory factor analysis), we identify (un-)sustainable consumer groups using a three-step procedure that combines multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). To test for differences among our identified groups, we use analysis of variance between groups with post hoc Scheffé tests. A national marketing research institute collected representative data for the German population via an online questionnaire. In total, we received 1,833 responses. The data were representative with respect to the following criteria: gender, household income, federal state, population of town of residence and number of persons in the household. Summary of Findings The segmentation procedure reveals five different segments of (un-)sustainable consumers. Between fairly unsustainable consumers (50%) and comprehensive sustainability-conscious consumers (10%) we identify three other segments with unique sustainable consciousness patterns: financially driven simplifiers, social/environmental consumers and collaborative consumers. Collaborative consumer group is most homogeneous in their behavioral patterns, whereas the most heterogeneous segment is the social-environmental group. With regard to the profile of the five CSC segments, comprehensive sustainability-conscious consumers are those most guided by the values of self-transcendence and openness to change. Conservation is most important for financially driven simplifiers, and collaborative consumers are strongly associated with self-enhancement values, hedonism and self-direction. Furthermore, comprehensive sustainable consumers are the most willing to purchase ecological/fair trade products. No/low-sustainability consumers have the highest amount of product possession followed by social/environmental consumers and collaborative consumers. Compared to the segment of collaborative consumers whose impulsive buying behavior is highest among all other segments, financially driven simplifier exhibit the lowest tendency toward impulsive buying. The collaborative consumers represent the youngest, male and well educated segment with the largest households. In contrast, financially simplifiers are older, predominantly female, significantly less educated and live in smaller households. Key Contributions The numerous theoretical concepts regarding sustainable consumer behavior developed to date can be classified into one or more of the environmental (e.g., Roberts 1996; Kotler 2011), social (e.g., Mohr, Webb and Harris 2001) and economic dimensions of sustainability (e.g., Lastovicka et al. 1999). Furthermore, most consumer typologies are one-dimensional and distinguish segments based on the intensity of consumption changes (e.g., Verain et al. 2012). Because sustainability entails several facets, namely environmental, social and economic facets, there may be segments that are interested in only the environmental, social or economic dimension or any other combination of these aspects of sustainability. At a normative level, our paper contribute to these gaps by ascertaining the mindful consumer (Sheth, Sethia and Srinivas 2011) and the citizen-consumer (Webster and Lusch 2013) approaches that represent the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) perspective of sustainable consumption. Secondly, we contribute to this gap by adopting the multidimensional model of consciousness for sustainable consumption (CSC) (Balderjahn et al. 2013) for uncovering segments of sustainable consumers and determine their profiles by applying HCA technique that incorporates multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) for rescaling cases in a low-dimensional space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]