To be or not to be sustainable in an emerging market? Conjoint analysis of customers' behavior in purchasing denim jeans

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate to what extent sustainable and nonsustainable attributes can be used to characterize different clusters of consumers in an emerging market, where economic conditions can increase the relevance of price. Consumers seem reluctant to engage frequently in pro-sustainable behavior, mainly for financial reasons. However, purchasing decisions can be understood as a multidimensional process.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted quantitative and descriptive research employing a choice-based conjoint/hierarchical Bayes (CBC/HB) experiment in malls in a low-income city in northeast Brazil with 1,287 potential buyers of denim jeans. The conjoint analysis therefore collected data on preferences in the course of actual decision-making. The authors then took the individual part-utility from each respondent and ran a cluster analysis to identify similar groups in the sample. The classification and regression tree (CART) method was used to determine the relationship between the conjoint attributes and the sociodemographic characteristics.FindingsThe data demonstrate that buying decisions constitute a complex process of interplay between many different factors, often involving trade-offs between a wide variety of nonsustainable and sustainable attributes. The survey confirmed that price is still of paramount importance when it comes to consumer choices. The authors also found that sustainable attributes played a relatively more significant role than brand or origin of production. The authors identify notable differences between groups of consumers in the “pro-sustainable” and “non-pro-sustainable” clusters and different levels of importance regarding the sociodemographic characteristics.Originality/valueAlthough price emerged as the most significant attribute, the research also demonstrates that there is a market in Brazil for products and practices based on a genuine commitment to the natural environment and social issues. The findings suggest that marketing managers and policymakers should consider different combinations of concerns over sustainability with product attributes and include sociodemographic variables rather than considering the textile market as uniform or thinking that there is no space for sustainability in fashion.

Value-based nudging of ethnic garments: a conjoint study to differentiate the value perception of ethnic products across Indian Markets

“…It can be used when the goal of the research is to measure preferences for product features, to learn how changes to price, etc., affect demand for products or services and to forecast the likely acceptance of a product if brought to market (Bryan, 2013). In the retail and apparel sector, conjoint-based research has been performed to compare evaluative attributes that Chinese and Indian consumers utilize when purchasing denim jeans (Jin et al , 2010), to discover which design elements influence dress purchases and how age affects consumers' choices with regard to these elements (Zhou and Xu, 2019), to examine consumer preference for ethical fashion products by focusing on the importance of animal welfare attribute (Mohamed et al , 2020), to provide an analytical framework for designing apparel considering both consumers' opinions and fashion designers' views (Saha and Roy, 2012), to explore and examine the relative impact of product and channel attributes on luxury product shopping in the multichannel environment (Lee et al , 2020) and to measure the extent to which sustainable attributes can be used to characterize different clusters of consumers in an emerging market (De Abreu et al , 2022). In similar lines, it has also been recently used to estimate the consumer utility of the packaging design of yoghurt (Wang et al , 2022), to study the influence of product lifetime labelling on purchase decisions (Jacobs and Hörisch, 2022) or to understand the relative importance of ethical attributes when consumers in the US make wool apparel purchase decisions (Sneddon et al , 2014).…”

Prioritizing customer requirements for men’s denim jeans through factor analysis and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

“…One way of achieving this objective is to understand customer needs, minimize the production of denim jeans which consumers do not buy and promote a slow fashion design model (Nergis et al, 2017). Hence, understanding the CRs for denim jeans has gotten the attention of researchers recently (Abreu et al, 2021;Shukla et al, 2022).…”

“…However, in such production strategy, the clothes are assumed to meet the expectations of the consumers in general, while individual customer requirements (CRs) cannot be satisfied fully which results in a gap between what the consumers really want and what manufacturers think the consumers want (Rayman et al, 2011). As a result, the question "Which clothing characteristics are favoured by customers in general (Bizuneh et al, 2021) or in a certain specific garment (Abreu et al, 2021)?" becomes a vital topic of research to identify the clothing evaluation criteria used by most consumers.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no published study investigated CRs for denim jeans in Africa in general, and in Ethiopia in particular. Moreover, the existing studies on CRs of denim jeans in other parts of the world are either qualitative focusing on a few product cues (Rahman, 2015) Prioritizing CRs for men's denim jeans or quantitative with specified sample denim jeans and selected few attributes (Abreu et al, 2021). The papers considering a relatively larger list of denim jeans attributes ranked the attributes using descriptive statistics such as mean score (Rahman, 2011) or the frequency of mentions of each attribute by their respondents (Wu and Delong, 2006).…”

Actitudes proambientales en segmentos de consumidores mexicanos y colombianos

“…La segmentación de consumidores es una técnica empleada con frecuencia para explorar comportamientos a favor del medio ambiente (Li, Overton & Bhalla, 2020). Es un hecho que los expertos deben clasificar los perfiles y categorías que los diferencian (Abreu, Ferreira & Silva, 2021). La literatura sobre su segmentación es clave para desarrollar estrategias de mercadotecnia a partir de los segmentos de consumo y sus características clasificadoras, por lo que es claro que las disparidades entre los consumidores impulsan a identificar las bases de esta clasificación (Jaiswal et al, 2021).…”