More Stupid Than the Others

I’m supposed to write this paper on what motivates people to buy ethically sourced products or environmentally friendly products and services for my Consumer Behaviour module. Of course I probably chose the hardest topic of the three I had available because I’m a masochist. I could have written about how one can advertise organic products in a more effective manner, it could also have been how to change attitudes towards them and encourage consumption of ‘ethical’ products. I didn’t and I don’t know why really, I just thought it would be interesting to take a look at what motivates people to pay a bit more for something that could do a lot more good to the World.

While doing research, I encountered a few things (I need to write down somewhere that isn’t a draft of my paper):

1. Over at Northern Planner, the post ‘Shopping and Courtship‘ made me read Miller’s ‘A Theory of Shopping‘ in less than a day. My book is on its way from Amazon but I’ve already went through all of it in the library, through ’shopping as sacrifice’ and the idea that ‘shopping takes the form of neither subject nor object but of the values to which people wish to dedicate themselves‘ .
2. Then I remembered a post from a while ago, a simple breakdown of how people think - ‘Four Rules To Understand What Makes People Tick‘ that divides thought into four slices - a rough 60% self-directed, 30% for relationships and 10% empathy. Sure, people can disagree with what has been said there as it’s not based on any kind of research but I don’t think the truth is far off from that. I just need to take the time and reflect on this matter and find some facts that confirm this hypothesis - “almost all people are far too self-absorbed to notice“. It also reminds me of Kant’s “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”
3. Then there was Gerald Zaltman’s ‘How Customers Think‘ that gave me another lead : ‘Consumers like the idea of many choices but not the mentally taxing effort to cope with them‘. It reminded me of my Principles of Marketing tutor who said ‘I think fairtrade coffee tastes like crap so I’d always pick a Nescafé over fairtrade coffee’. Another thought came from a lady in the coffee aisle at Sainsbury’s who said ‘I can barely choose my coffee from all these local brands, how will I choose one from all the fairtrade varieties? Do I have to think about what region is more disadvantaged and buy that one?’. The last thought came from an overheard conversation at Starbucks where two people were arguing over where on the map is Kenya and then asking themselves whether they grow coffee beans in Darfur. Y’know, just because they heard of it on the news. That lead me back to #2 in a way. Somewhere, people are dying…but do they make coffee? Is this some form of guilt?
4. And last but not least as I’m halfway through this thing, I remembered Stella Artois and their ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ positioning or rather ‘Precious’ approach in the UK and an interesting thought from Stefan

In the end, I don’t even know what to write about what motivates people. I know I’m motivated because I was brought up to think ‘waste not want not’ and to turn off the light in the room when I’m not there, not leave the water tap running when I don’t need it, replace baths with showers and all those small things - it’s something I never really questioned but just knew it was ‘there’. It kept being reinforced till I was old enough to figure out for myself why I was doing it and the only thing that scared me was the prospect that if we keep wasting our resources, the world as we know it might change into something we can’t control and we generally won’t be able to produce more than we consume. Scary. It made me think ‘hey, I want to contribute at least a bit because my kids might not live to see it the way I did’.

I tend to think it’s the feeling of guilt and responsability that would make people buy environment-friendly products and/or services and on the other hand. I also think that the level and depth of feeling depends on the level of involvement. Oh well.