Unraveling the intricate relationship between consumer behavior and ethical product choices, we delve into the question - do consumers really care about the ethicality of your product? Let's explore the impact of ethics on consumer preferences and purchasing decisions.
New research shows that morality matters-but it’s in the eye of the beholder
Do consumers care about morality when making purchasing decisions?
- Jacob Teeny, an assistant professor of marketing, set out to answer this question in two recently published articles
- In the first, a review of existing research on consumer morality, Teeny and colleagues Aviva Philipp-Muller and Richard E. Petty of The Ohio State University identify weaknesses in how previous studies assessed morality-weaknesses that they believe contribute to the conflicting findings
- In the second, Teenys, Petty, and Andrew Luttrell of Ball State University experimentally test a new way of approaching consumer morality.
Marketing on Morality
Consumers care about morality and reliably act on it
- Positioning products in ways that are relevant to a consumer’s sense of morality has the potential to be an effective form of motivating consumer behavior
- Consumer morality is constantly evolving, so it is important to learn how different consumer segments differentially moralize the same products or attributes
Why “Organic” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Moral”
Previous studies used an “attribute-level approach” to studying morality
- This assumes that certain product attributes, like being eco-friendly, locally manufactured, or cruelty-free, are universally considered moral by consumers
- However, not everyone sees these attributes as moral in the first place
- There’s no way to tell the difference between consumers who buy an “ethical” product for moral reasons or pragmatic ones
- Similarly, there’s not able to tell if a consumer is rejecting an ethical product because they don’t care about morality or because they do not view animal testing as an ethical issue
Morality and Attitude
Teeny and his colleagues advocate for a third approach that helps disentangle what consumers view as moral from what they like or dislike for unrelated reasons
- An attitude-based approach makes it possible to figure out whether individual consumers are indeed weighing morality in their purchasing decisions
- Just getting people to self-perceive their own attitudes about a product are based on morality leads them to be more likely to purchase it
- Another experiment established that the more moral a person perceived a product to be, the more likely they were to want to buy it-regardless of how well the product was reviewed
