Sustainability and Perception of Brand Communication

Abstract

Several occurrences – the nuclear disaster in Fukushima 2011 or the widespread meat scandal in Germany in 2005, for instance – seem to have enhanced the success potentials for sustainability oriented business fields. Companies are increasing their efforts, not only in developing and producing sustainable products and services, but also in putting sustainability at the forefront of their communication strategies and their brand management in order to position themselves as sustainable brands in branch-related consumer markets. We currently detect a high interest in research in early stages of the consumption process, following the general question of how sustainable brand communication is perceived by consumers (see Belz, F.-M. 2001). Prevalent discussions in the practitioners’ environment mostly act on the assumption that younger consumer groups in particular, also affected by the aforementioned environmental occurrences, consider themselves as sustainable-oriented but without showing sustainable-oriented buying behaviour (Bundesministerium fur Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit (BMU) 2010). An additional willingness to pay could only be identified in individual cases where the purchase of a sustainable product would lead to a higher direct and personal “egoistic” value for those younger consumers (see Belz and Peattie 2010). In this paper, we assess the preceding stages of the consumption process. We evaluate whether the value-pricing-related assumptions of the “sustainability-driven” buying process could be transferred to the perception of sustainable brand communication as well. By combining an eye tracking analysis with standardized interviews of 93 younger German consumers, we evaluate if consumers who consider themselves as “sustainable people” perceive sustainable brand communication differently from those consumers without a “sustainable attitude”. Based on the findings of an extended contingent value approach (Spash 2006), we further examine if sustainable brand communication relating to products and branches with a higher personal “egoistic” value of the sustainable effect leads to increased perception of those communication activities by younger consumers compared with products with lower personal value of the sustainable effect.