Consumer perspectives Procedia CIRP 2018 Gnana Cole Singh Cooper.pdf (211.89 kB)
Consumer perspectives on longevity and reliability: A national study of purchasing factors across eighteen product categories
conference contribution
posted on 2018-09-11, 08:51 authored by Alex Gnanapragasam, Christine Cole, Jagdeep Singh, Tim Cooper© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Increasing global demand for durable goods prevents the decoupling of economic growth from natural resource use required to achieve sustainable consumption and production. Presently, most consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) exhibit a strong preference for purchasing new durable goods. Therefore, short-to-medium term strategies that seek to engender sustainable consumption of durable goods should focus on encouraging consumers to choose longer-lasting, reliable products. This paper outlines the importance consumers place on six purchasing factors (appearance, brand, guarantee length, longevity, price and reliability) across eighteen categories of durable goods. Data was collected from a UK national survey of consumer satisfaction with product lifetimes (n=2207). The research identified that most consumers consistently emphasise the importance of longevity and reliability when purchasing new products. If consumer preference for longer-lasting, reliable products can be translated into purchasing behaviour, progress can be made towards engendering sustainable consumption, enacting the circular economy and reducing national ecological footprints.
Funding
This research was undertaken with financial support from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s funded Centre for Industrial Energy, Materials and Prod-ucts, grant reference EP/N022645/1.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Procedia CIRP Procedia CIRPVolume
69Pages
910 - 915Citation
GNANAPRAGASAM, A. ... et al., 2018. Consumer perspectives on longevity and reliability: A national study of purchasing factors across eighteen product categories. Procedia CIRP, 69, pp. 910-915.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by ElsevierVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-11-01Publication date
2018Notes
This paper was presented at the 25th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) Conference, 30 April – 2 May 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark. This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ISSN
2212-8271Publisher version
Language
- en