Stefanie Wirthsmann

Stefanie Wirthsmann is a master student of business administration at Philipps University of Marburg (Germany) where she also completed her Bachelor of Science Degree.

In her master thesis, Stefanie will investigate consumer’s preferences for sustainable packaging.  Since mountains of garbage are growing rapidly and plastic is polluting our oceans, public pressure on manufacturers increases - expecting them to enlarge their use of sustainable packaging. But the central issue within this topic lies on the shopper side: At the POP shoppers tend to choose products, which are not environmental-friendly packaged. Therefore, the research project is aimed at helping manufacturers to design sustainable packaging, which signals its sustainability effectively to shoppers and is bought at the POP. In detail, the study analyzes the influence of different sustainable packaging attributes on perceived utility and product choice. Moreover, it will be investigated if consumer segments can be identified based on respondents’ preferences for the attributes.

Results

The empirical study is based on a choice-based conjoint analysis, that investigates the preferences for different tomato-sauce packaging. The sample consists of 461 German college students. The findings indicate that the product choices are influenced by the price of the product, the colour and the material of the packaging as well as the existence of a packaging claim and an environmental label. Regarding the complete sample, the results show that the material is the most important attribute- followed by price on the second place and claim and label on place three and four. Compared to the other attributes, the colour of the packaging has the smallest influence on the respondents’ product choices.

Using a latent class analysis, the students were grouped in four segments based on the similarities of their preferences: “price-oriented” (31% of the sample), “material-oriented” (27% of the sample) , “information-oriented”(31% of the sample) and “ green-design oriented” (11% of the sample). One of the most important key findings is that the price of the product plays an important role in the context of sustainable packaging. Only concerning the smallest segment, price is less important than the other “sustainable” attributes. Moreover, the material of the packaging has a strong influence on the product choices in all segments. This is particularly interesting concerning the facts that the material has also the biggest influence on the sustainability of the packaging and that the findings of earlier studies indicate that most consumers are not able to identify sustainable materials – typically the sustainability of glass is overestimated. In line with this, the results of this study show that glass has a biggest utility out of all investigated materials.