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Young wine consumers are becoming increasingly important for the wine industry, but also represent a challenge for wine businesses as their consumer behavior and attitude towards wine differs from other generations. This relative new group of wine consumers shows a comparatively low level of wine knowledge, while focusing wine choice criteria rather on different attributes, namely wine bottle optics, including label and bottle optic in general. Being aware of wine consumers choice criteria and its implications is crucial for wine marketers to successfully attract their potential customers. The presented thesis uses grounded theory to determine how the choice criteria of wine bottle optic influences the choice criteria of taste, in Gen Z wine consumers. For this purpose, a group of ten Gen Z wine consumers took part in a qualitative experiment, including pre- and post-test interviews, to determine attitude and behavior of participants concerning the wine choice criteria of taste and wine bottle optic. The findings of the study suggest that the choice criteria of wine bottle optic can overrule the importance of the wines actual taste in the decision process of wines. Furthermore, insights into the participants awareness of their own choice criteria, the influence of cognitive dissonance on the topic, as well as general attitude towards wine, such as the low level of knowledge and the preference for wine consumption in social context, could be generated.
The market for foods and beverages is one of the largest worldwide. Thus, there is a lot of interest in understanding and predicting consumer behavior. Two subjects that have gained attention recently in the food sector are perceived naturalness and high-tech eco-innovations like cultured meat. This work addresses how the preference for natural products and the inference of product attributes via perceived naturalness causes problems for novel technological food products. By reviewing existing literature following questions will be answered: (1) What do most people assume about the health, taste, sustainability, and safety of food products based on perceived naturalness? (2) How is the public acceptance of high-tech food eco-innovations influenced by a lack of perceived naturalness? (3) How can these challenges be addressed by food businesses? It will first be determined what natural means for customers and how it influences food choices in general. The main findings based on the currently available market research are consumers do not desire to consume any highly unnatural foods including technological eco-innovations and it might be more efficient in terms of sustainability gains and customer needs to commit resources to developing existing products or eco-innovations that are perceived to be natural.
Year after year, global warming, and plastic output increase, and massive volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) are being released into the atmosphere. Even though humans are aware of their environmental impact, they do struggle to change their behavior. But what is the reason for this?
The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the factors that make it difficult for people to demonstrate pro-environmental behavior (PEB) and to form ideas from the field of nudging to assist in guiding humans to a better PEB. As a result, a meta-analysis was created from a multitude of papers on the issues of PEB and nudging. The proposals presented in this work serve as an impetus for future studies in the field of PEB nudging.
Due to technical advances, multisensory technologies have gained traction in the research and development of many industries. With the launch of virtual and augmented reality systems, the potential for these technologies increased even further. The senses of vision and hearing have long been integrated into current products, leading to the assumption that olfactory stimuli are likely to be included soon to stimulate the sense of smell.
With this trend, the issue of implementation into current digital products and services arises, as odors currently cannot be captured in one place and released in another on a large scale. Therefore, this thesis deals with the nature of smell from a cognitive psychological and technological viewpoint. We show why it makes sense to stimulate the sense of smell in multisensory experiences and present early and current technical standards. In addition to this, we conducted expert interviews enabling us to provide insights into the digital scent and olfaction industry. Among other aspects, our results suggest that there are fundamental challenges that developers have to overcome and that a successful implementation depends on the business application.
Prior research found extremeness aversion effects to be common and robust. Nevertheless, most research neglected the spatial arrangement's influence on a consumer's choice and placed the compromise option of a choice set simultaneously in the spatial middle. Following these findings, five bachelor theses were conducted to investigate both aspects by analyzing numerical and spatial choice architectures – their data comprised three online surveys and three field experiments. This study aimed to compare their findings and analyze their data sets to search for overarching effects. Therefore, we hypothesized that there is either information-format compatibility or a general tendency towards the spatial middle of a choice set. To research this hypothesis, we brought the data sets into a comparable format, analyzed our findings, and conducted t-tests to test for statistical significance. Even though the study could not find overarching effects across the data, it supports the notion that a choice set's spatial arrangement, like the numerical one, can influence consumer behavior. Furthermore, it led to valuable insights for future research approaches concerning expanding extremeness aversion into a spatial dimension.
A Descriptive Study on Customer Attitudes towards Green Branding in the Fashion Industry in Germany
(2021)
This paper attempts to provide an up-to-date representation and analysis of customers' attitudes towards green branding in the fashion industry and their willingness to pay (WTP) for sustainable and ethical clothing in Germany. Related literature strands are reviewed to understand how the fashion industry works, what green branding means, and how customer attitudes are shaped. After creating an attitude measurement model, an online questionnaire was designed and sent to Furtwangen University students, with 153 valid responses returned. The descriptive analysis sheds light on the three attitudinal components related to sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry. It is noted that customers do not hold a definite attitude. However, a tendency towards the positive end is ascertained. Significant gaps still exist in terms of knowledge and awareness of some commitment by fashion brands. Another huge factor influencing attitudes appears to be a lack of trust. The behavioral component showed that customers are trying to contribute through proper disposal and are willing to buy sustainable and ethical clothing more often. However, there is still some room for improvement in terms of customer education. Nevertheless, it is found that they are willing to accept an additional contribution for sustainable and ethical clothing. In general, it can be concluded that there is a foundation to improve the fashion industry towards more sustainability. However, all stakeholders, i.e., customers and fashion brands, as well as the government, need to work together to change the industry in the long run.
The aim of this study is to understand the concept of Ethical Branding from the perspective of Generation Z. This umbrella question was divided into three research questions: 1. What constitutes an ethical brand for Generation Z, 2. What is Generation Z´s attitude towards ethical brands, and 3. How will the future of ethical brands look like? For this, ten individual online interviews with undergraduate students were conducted. Findings reveal that young people view Ethical Branding as an important personal issue. Members of Generation Z view an ethical brand as holding values such as fairness, honesty, integrity, and consideration at its core and consistently acting according to these values. This manifests itself in the fulfillment of environmental, social, legal, and economic responsibilities. Participants depict a largely positive outlook for ethical brands as society – in particular young consumers – becomes more aware of the importance of mindful and responsible consumption, challenging existing brands in the future. Companies should therefore focus on delivering what they promise and aligning all business activities if they want to be perceived by Generation Z as a truly ethical brand.
Understanding how consumers choose between alternatives and how they use the context in doing so is the aim of numerous consumer behaviour studies. The effect of extremeness aversion has been found to be a replicable phenomenon in this field. According to this context effect, alternatives with extreme numerical attributes are less likely to be chosen than the alternative with intermediate attributes in a choice set. A new research direction regarding extremeness aversion considers not only these numerical attributes of a choice set but also the implications of the spatial dimension. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that there could also be a preference for the spatial middle in a choice set. As the phenomenon of extremeness aversion corresponds with decision uncertainty, this research aimed to investigate numerical and spatial extremeness aversion in a product class of high uncertainty and complexity. Thus, consumer preferences regarding the product class of wine were analysed in different choice architectures. Interviews in a wine specialist store and an online survey were conducted with a total number of 924 participants. The study’s results are not consistent over both data collection methods. However, independently of each other, they support the notion that consumer choices may be partly influenced by a preference for the numerical middle option, as well as by a preference for the spatial middle option.
The world is constantly changing, and cosmetic companies need to adapt to these changes to survive. In particular, cosmetic companies should not underestimate changes in how customers value information from different sources because proper marketing can lead to increased sales. Therefore, this thesis aims to determine which information sources customers of Generation Y are using and how they weight the information from these different sources. A survey was conducted with people of Generation Y to answer the research question. The survey showed that the most frequently used and highest weighted sources for getting information are search engines, friends and family, and product ratings. Furthermore, the results indicate that information gathered from offline sources has a more significant impact on purchase behavior than information gathered from online sources. Potential customers using search engines are more likely to buy a product online. However, the price of a product does not influence how consumers weight the opinions of friends and family, and age does not impact the weighting of social media or the total number of sources a customer uses. To conclude, a company should not ignore the importance of offline information sources because the data shows that offline sources significantly impact buying behavior. They should also aim to have their online shop appear as one of the top search engine results because this will impact the likelihood that customers visit their websites and buy their products.
This thesis deals with the marketing of today and its benefits for companies and universities. The focus is on the recruitment of students at universities through the business platform LinkedIn. The tools offered by LinkedIn will be presented and the purpose for which they are beneficial will be determined. Surveys are used to clarify questions about the use of social networks for different activities. In addition, it will be worked out why students choose a university and how LinkedIn fosters this. These findings are then translated into marketing measures for the HFU Business School in Villingen-Schwenningen.