Sustainability marketing has emerged as an important trend both in practice and academic literature. The relevant literature has heavily focused on determinations of sustainable consumer behavior, and practitioners have used these results to derive short-term marketing decisions, e.g., adequate pricing of sustainable products. However, no study has scrutinized derivations of sustainable brand personalities or provided important long-term, strategic, managerial implications for marketing managers of sustainable brands. This study aims to contribute to this underrepresented research field and makes recommendations for preferred brand personality dimensions for sustainable brands. First, the personality structure of sustainable consumers by using a preference-based two-step segmentation approach is investigated, and subsequent profiling of the sustainable consumer segment is conducted. The research relies on the results of an empirical discrete choice experiment and a personality test, including the data of a representative German consumer sample. Sustainable consumers were found to be highly agreeable and open. Second, the personality results of sustainable consumers are linked to consumers’ personality-specific preferred brand personalities. Third, recommendations for harmonic brand personality dimensions for sustainable brands, e.g., competence, excitement, and sincerity, are derived, and therefore, long-term, strategic, managerial implications are provided.
Currently, social consumption constitutes a rapidly increasing trend with significant potential for companies; moreover, the characterization of social consumers is highly relevant. To date, sociodemographic variables have been widely studied but appear to be less appropriate to uniquely characterize social consumers. Psychographic variables are credited with the ability to overcome these problems, since recent studies maintain that consumers’ personal values and lifestyles are predictors of social consumption. However, personal values and lifestyle represent only two categories of psychological variables. Personality is another variable further known to be an antecedent of personal values and lifestyle. In this study, we focus on the characterization of social consumers based on both their personalities and sociodemographic variables. We conduct an empirical discrete choice experiment and investigate consumers’ personalities as a driver of consumer preferences for the fair trade (FT) label attribute. To operationalize consumers’ personalities, we use the popular five-factor approach. For the determination of consumers’ preferences, we estimate a mixed logit model including both unobserved preference heterogeneity and observed heterogeneity. Observed heterogeneity is captured by consumers’ personalities and sociodemographic variables. We find that gender, academic degree, income and four personality traits are important drivers of consumers’ social preferences. We determine the interaction effects between sociodemographic and personality variables and argue for the consideration of personality in the characterization of social consumers as the core source of social preferences. A subsequent simulation study provides further insight into marketing strategies derived from the personality-characterization of social consumers.
The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments as well as the co-editor of the special section, Udo Wagner, for his detailed feedback and suggestions. Furthermore, the authors benefitted from critical discussions with participants at the 5 th French-Austrian-German Workshop on Consumer Behavior. Daniel Guhl gratefully acknowledges support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through CRC TRR 190.
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