Modelling Consumer Behaviour

Principal Investigator: Professor Dale Southerton
Email dale.southerton@manchester.ac.uk

Flagship team: Geoff Beattie, Elisa Bellotti, Partha Dasgupta, Mika Kortelainen, Laura McGuire, Luca Panzone, Dan Rigby, Laura Sale, Ada Wossink, David Evans and Doron Cohen.

Why do consumers express values that favor more sustainable consumer behaviours yet fail to act accordingly? What are the key barriers and constraints to the mass adoption of greener lifestyles? How can we, as a society, foster more sustainable consumer behaviours? What mechanisms for behaviour change work best for which social groups, for different products and according to different consumer practices? These are just some of the critical questions that the research project, Modelling Consumer Behaviour will address.

This project is the first inter-disciplinary research to compare, in a systematic empirical investigation, the predictive capacity of the core theoretical models of consumer behaviour from the social sciences (principally from Economics, Psychology and Sociology). The research will also explore cutting edge ideas about consumer behaviour. This will be achieved through the use and application of a unique data source (Tesco club card data) together with advanced statistical analysis and combined with inventive survey and qualitative methodologies. The research will engage extensively with academic, policy, practice, and commercial communities. Its success will be represented by a number of tangible outcomes:

"It will provide fundamental social scientific research that will develop the knowledge-base on consumer behaviour and consumption.

"It will tackle the intractable issue that continues to frustrate existing policy interventions to behavioural change of how to change habitual behaviour. It will do so through generating a range of recommendations ranging from general principles for changing behaviour through to specific intervention measures.

"Through engagement with policy, commercial and academic stakeholders, it will enable the mutual sharing of practices and ideas for application to specific problems.

"It will provide explanations as to why consumers consume in particular ways, which is necessary to better understand how their behaviour will change and to encourage it towards greener lifestyles.

The project formally began in late 2010 and will run until the end of 2012. Early research activity has centred on analysis of revealed preferences as indicated through Tesco Clubcard records. An 'Environmentally Sensitive Shopper' (ESS) index has been produced, which analyses (and scores) customer's propensity to purchase more sustainable goods based on indicators from policy advice for more sustainable diets. Early results demonstrate a significant degree of seasonality, and suggests that few purchase 'greener' goods on the basis of the environment (rather, on the basis of health, taste and other ethical values). The next stage will be to examine trajectories of environmental shopping, to determine whether, and which, consumers are becoming more or less 'green' in their revealed preference over a 24 month period.

A second component of the project has explored coverage of sustainability in relation to food in the printed media since 2000. It has found a steady increase of coverage until 2008, with more erratic spikes in reporting since the start of the economic downturn. Currently, qualitative analysis on the content of articles is being conducted. The trends in media coverage of the issue will be correlated against the trends in revealed preferences derived from Tesco Clubcard records in order to identify if there appears to be any relationship between the media and shopping activities. In addition, the project will explore the relationship between readership of different newspapers and propensity to purchase more sustainable goods across different groups of consumers.

The final major component of the project is to examine the Tesco Shopper Thoughts survey panel data. This will allow us to explore consumers stated preferences, which we can analyse in relation to their revealed preferences (their expenditure) and against the information likely to be available to them (e.g. ascertained from our media analysis). In addition, new surveys will be commissioned which explore broader lifestyle activities. In this way, we will know what different groups of people buy, what they do (their practices), their exposure to information, and their values and attitudes.

In addition, our research will pay significant attention to a number of other critical variables and issues. We will explore the influence of social networks on consumers' lifestyles, the significance of time pressure, and the temporal organisation of daily lives (e.g. when they shop and work). Using the latest technology we will explore the impact of 'implicit' (as opposed to explicit) attitudes. In conducting the research, all known policy mechanisms for addressing behaviour change will be examined, including information, promotions and incentives, labelling, 'nudging', product placements and so on. The express aim is to identify a model (or models) of consumer behaviour which will provide the critical knowledge for applying mechanisms of behaviour change across different groups, products and contexts. To aid this, action research will be applied in order to test the models developed.

This project involves scholars based in Sociology (Dale Southerton, David Evans, Elisa Belotti, and Alan Warde), Economics (Sir Partha Dasgupta, Ada Wossink, Mika Kortelainen, Luca Panzone, and Dan Rigby) and Psychology (Geoff Beattie, Laura Sale, Laura McGuire and Doron Cohen). It also involves collaboration with Dunnhumby, who have assigned a research analyst to work on the project, and members of the Sustainable Practices Research Group.