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Project: Consumer Personality

January 23, 2024

The more concerned you are, the greener you are: The role of consumer personality towards adoption of biobased shopping bags

Plastic waste is known as the worst pollutant to our environment, with single-use plastic shopping bags perceived as the biggest cause of this issue. However, despite massive actions undertaken by environmentalists and government agencies to promote the adoption of biobased shopping bags, human behavior towards single-use plastic shopping bag consumption continues to persist and unfortunately, is soaring. To address this issue, we propose that consumer personality traits significantly influence this behavior. Therefore, we apply motive disposition theory (MDT) and institutional theory to examine consumers’ motives, specifically focusing on the power motive and the institutions that influence them. By employing an online survey and moderated mediation analysis, a sample of 207 individuals was engaged to investigate the influence of consumers’ power motives on green consumption towards biobased shopping bags. The results indicate that this relationship is contingent upon the mediating role of consumer environmental concern. Additionally, it has been observed that the level of adoption is even stronger when consumers perceive that knowledge supporting environmentally friendly behavior is accessible to them.

October 30, 2023

Who Prefers Legal Wood: Consumers with Utilitarian or Hedonic Shopping Values?

Although certification is perceived to be beneficial for enhancing forest sustainability and open access to green markets, certification practices in Indonesia face controversy, particularly in its wood-based industry. We aim to approach this issue from the end-user perspective. Drawing on the theories of value-belief-norm and planned behavior, we examine the psychological aspects of consumers toward legal wood consumption. A survey of 515 consumers showed that individuals with hedonic values tended to have a high perception of green values toward legal wood. Also, when consumers’ hedonic values dominated over their utilitarian consumption, their perception of green values toward legal wood tends to be higher. Based on these results, wood marketers could benefit from directing their communication efforts toward emphasizing the hedonic worth of the product, as opposed to its utilitarian values. It is imperative for distributors and promoters of wood products to carefully deliberate on strategies to effectively elicit the hedonic shopping values that are inherently linked to the utilization of such green products. An illustration can be represented by the case of IKEA in Indonesia. Consumers are probably attracted to IKEA’s neuromarketing strategy, such as their attractive display and labyrinth effect, without realizing that IKEA also applies green marketing and supports green products.

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