Sprott’s Irene Lu and Ernest Kwan Discuss How COVID-19 Affects Consumers’ Purchase Intentions
Environmentally friendly goods are growing in popularity—particularly in e-commerce—for both producers (creators) and consumers; a market that is key to help reduce waste and promote ecological sustainability. But when the world was hit with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, everything changed. Irene Lu, Associate Professor, Marketing and Ernest Kwan, Associate Professor, Supply Chain Management, set out to better understand how and why the threat of COVID-19 could impact consumers’ purchase intentions and motivations. Funded by the Carleton University COVID-19 Rapid Research Response grant and the Insight Development Grant (IDG) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), their research, published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, highlights how businesses and producers can effectively market sustainable products and allow this area of commerce to grow, even during challenging times. We sat down with Irene and Ernest to learn more about their novel research and discuss some of their unexpected findings.
You were awarded two grants—a SSHRC IDG and a COVID-19 Rapid Response Research grant related to sustainable consumption. Can you tell us more about these projects?
Ernest: For the COVID-19 grant, we set out to explore how contagion concerns could impact sustainable consumption. In that sense, we investigated the usefulness or the efficacy of remedial measures to address contagion concerns—specifically through messaging about the products’ sanitization or by familiarizing the store owner or seller with the consumer. The SSHRC grant supported the investigation into a specific type of sustainable product, namely, repurposed products, which are a relatively new form of sustainable consumption. Repurposed products are created by the transformation of old products into products of greater value that serve a different function. Repurposing is growing in popularity—particularly in e-commerce—for both producers (creators) and consumers.
Irene: Given the onset of the pandemic, we wanted to take the opportunity to merge the two projects and investigate repurposed products in the context of contagion concerns. Specifically, we wanted to know what happens to repurposed products in the marketplace and how remedial measures can impact consumer purchase intentions around repurposed products during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on evolutionary psychology, human instinct to avoid disease can be quite powerful, and when this instinct is activated, we often ignore less urgent threats to our safety. For example, a person may regard climate change as an existential threat and therefore make environmentally conscious choices as a consumer. But during the pandemic, the more urgent threat is no longer climate change, it is COVID-19. This same person, then, may forgo shopping sustainably (e.g., buying second-hand) due to fear of contagion and instead find single-use products more appealing. Accordingly, we predicted that those participants who were particularly worried about COVID-19 would evaluate sustainable products as less desirable compared to new products (i.e., products that are made from virgin material).
What did you discover about consumers’ reactions to sustainable products during COVID-19?
Ernest: We studied four types of products—new, repurposed, refurbished, and recycled and how consumer purchase intentions may be influenced by disease threat. We were also interested in comparing products that are used close to, versus away from the body, or what we refer to as “intimate” versus “non-intimate” products. Past research suggests that contagion concerns are more pronounced for intimate products. We wanted to examine this further. We compared cups to pen holders, which correspond to intimate and non-intimate products, respectively. Our participants encountered one of eight possible products, either a cup or pen holder, which could be new, repurposed, refurbished, or recycled.
Irene: The results were in-line with conjectures from evolutionary psychology. Disease threat—how anxious our participants felt about COVID-19—did affect how sustainable products were perceived. Specifically, as anxiety over COVID-19 increased, our participants evaluated sustainable products as less desirable compared to new products, in terms of willingness to buy the products. This happened when we compared new to refurbished cups, as well as when we compared new to repurposed cups. The same trend was found for repurposed pen holders. Our results strongly suggest that sustainable consumption has suffered during the pandemic. Moreover, that when society encounters subsequent waves of COVID-19, or other disease outbreaks, there is likely to be detrimental impacts on sustainable consumption.
Given this consumer response, what were the remedial measures that you considered?
Irene: We investigated two possible remedial measures—a sanitization message and the store owner’s identity—both approaches related to evolutionary psychology. The first remedial measure is to include a sanitization message in the product description, such as, “all products will be thoroughly sanitized or cleaned prior to shipping to consumers.” While this may seem like a no-brainer, a sanitization message may backfire because it could trigger consumers’ contagion concerns. Why? Because according to evolutionary psychology, our instinct is to overreact to cues or signs of disease, perhaps even in an irrational way. For example, a sanitization message could imply that the retailer is trying to be hygienic, but it could also suggest that the retailer is making this effort because the store had a recent outbreak. The chance of a consumer staying healthy (i.e., not catching COVID-19) is higher if the consumer behaves according to the latter interpretation, and accordingly, avoids any interaction with the retailer. It is interesting to determine the circumstances where such a message could backfire.
Ernest: The second remedial measure is to include information about the store owner in the product description to familiarize the participants with the store owner. The efficacy of this remedial measure, as previously mentioned, is based on evolutionary psychology. That is, during a pandemic, if we have a choice to interact with a person we know, versus someone we do not, our instinct is to choose someone we know. That is because the chance is lower to catch something new from people we know, versus people we do not. In other words, someone from outside our social circle is more likely to be from a foreign environment, so the chance is higher that he or she carries a disease that we have not yet encountered (i.e., something we are not immune against).
We wanted to test how these two remedial measures would help consumer attitudes towards sustainable products. It is also worth mentioning that past research has not had the opportunity as we have now to examine the efficacy of these remedial measures to counter a real disease threat in real time. The fact that we are living through a pandemic gives us a unique opportunity.
What are some of your findings with regards to these remedial measures?
Irene: Overall, when it came to the store owner’s identity, we found that when disease threat was high, knowing more information about the store owner led to a more positive evaluation of repurposed and refurbished intimate products—which is good news for sustainable consumption.
Ernest: Interestingly, we found that the sanitization message did have a counter-productive effect: When we included a sanitization message with the repurposed pen holders, they received a much lower evaluation. We speculate that the sanitization message reminded participants of contagion, so the past identity as a wine bottle (i.e., an intimate product that involved food consumption) made these pen holders less appealing. One of our conclusions, therefore, is that the source product of a repurposed product matters. Even though the repurposed product itself is non-intimate, the fact that the source product was intimate could make a difference in terms of contagion concerns.
How do your results contribute to the consumer marketing arena?
Irene: Our findings have valuable implications for retailers and marketers in Canada, particularly those associated with selling platforms like, Etsy—a leading site for repurposed goods. Because we examined the factors that can alleviate consumer concerns over contagion, our results can suggest immediate adaptions to marketing strategies. It seems that COVID-19 is going to be part of our lives into the foreseeable future; retailers and marketers should therefore be proactive and ensure that the appeal of sustainable products do not suffer during challenging times.