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Article
Toward a Sustainable Marketplace: Expanding Options and Benefits for Consumers
Mason School of Business Articles
  • Michael G Luchs, College of William and Mary
  • Rebecca W Naylor, Ohio State University - Main Campus
  • Randall L Rose, University of South Carolina
  • Jesse R Catlin, University of California, Irvine
  • Roland Gau, Tulane University
  • Sommer Kapitan, University of Texas San Antonio
  • Jenny Mish, University of Notre Dame
  • Lucie Ozanne, University of Canterbury
  • Marcus Phipps, University of Melbourne
  • Bonnie Simpson, University of Calgary
Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Business
Pub Date
1-1-2011
Sponsorship / Conference
3rd Transformative Consumer Research Conference
Abstract

While popular interest in sustainable consumption continues to grow, there is a persistent gap between consumers’ typically positive explicit attitudes towards sustainability and their actual consumption behaviours. This gap can be explained, in part, by the belief that choosing to consume sustainably is both constraining and reduces individual-level benefits. While the belief that sustainable consumption depends on making trade-offs is true in some contexts, increasingly consumers are finding that more sustainable forms of consumption can provide both an expanded set of options and additional, individual-level benefits. In this essay, we discuss and illustrate an expanded set of options and benefits across the consumption cycle: from acquisition to usage and disposition. An underlying theme is the separation of material ownership from the extraction of consumer benefits across the consumption cycle. We believe that this ongoing evolution of products - and even business models - has the potential to simultaneously increase value to consumers as well as speed progress towards a more sustainable marketplace.

Disciplines
Journal Article URL
http://jrconsumers.com/Academic_Articles/issue_19/Sustainability_academic4.pdf
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Citation Information
Luchs, Michael G., Rebecca Walker Naylor and Randall L. Rose (2011), “Toward a Sustainable Marketplace: Expanding Options and Benefits for Consumers,” Journal of Research for Consumers, 19: 1-12.