Fashion consumption at the intersection of materialistic desires and consumer ethics – How do consumers manage the tension when their materialistic desires and environmental values conflict?
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2022
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
56+4
Series
Abstract
Sometimes our ethical and environmental values do not meet with the things we desire. Even if we might want to support a sustainable lifestyle and consume with consideration due to environmental reasons, sometimes we desire those new shoes or a new jacket, even if it might be more of a want than a need, and perhaps from a fast fashion chain that was just on the news on something questionable. This discrepancy between desires and values often causes some negative emotions and creates an interesting consumption dilemma: what to do with those emotions? This thesis examines how young consumers experience and manage that tension between desires and values, and to what kind of consumption decisions it leads them to. The academic literature conducted on such attitude-behavior gap and sustainability of fashion provides a basis for deepening understanding on how Generation Z, who has grown into the world of fast fashion, experiences their clothing consumption and how they might manage such tension if it appears. Generation Z is also chosen as the population due to their proclaimed environmental activism and green consumerism interests, also related to fashion consumption. This thesis first combines the academic literature to create a conceptual framework to describe the different stages the consumer goes through when experiencing the said tension, creating a consumer journey. The journey consists of a pre-purchase stage including avoidance behavior, during purchase stage including justification and rationalization behavior, and finally a post-purchase behavior with compensatory behavior. The framework then acts as a lens to study pri-mary data through, as semi-structured interviews of young, Finnish consumers are conducted to find examples of said behavior. The findings would suggest that negative moral emotions, such as guilt or shame, seem to spark a great deal of the behavior happening around unethical consumption desires. For instance, such emotions play a significant role, when after an “unethical” purchase the consumer feels a need to compensate for their actions, and climate guilt seems to be present in environmentally unethical consumption situations. Examining consumer behavior related to sustainability and ethical consumption of clothes can provide important information on how young consumers would like to consume more sustainably, and most importantly how would they be more motivated to do so.Description
Thesis advisor
Gloukhovtsev, AlexeiKeywords
sustainable fashion, green consumerism, consumer behavior, climate guilt, managing feelings