| dc.description.abstract | Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to evaluate consumers believability
and their behaviour in two situations: first when they are exposed to a natural
resource depletion prediction and secondly when they learn that a future
government policy restricting their access to the resource is due to be
implemented. While previous studies have only considered commodity as
products that are transformed and manufactured such as classical products, luxury
products, no past study examined the commodity as natural resources. This study
also analyses the findings of environmental literature and the limitations of
predictions and policies due to barriers such as psychological distance or emotions
leading to denial for instance. Basically, as there are some discrepancies between
the findings of marketing and green research, our goal is to understand if
consumers would behave according to the scarcity marketing theories and behave
in a competitive and selfish way or if they would not change their behaviour
because of denying processes or a lack of trust.
Academic background:
Overall, the marketing literature states that when a consumer is exposed to a
scarcity context, he is more likely to behave in a selfish and competitive way
(Roux, Goldsmith, & Bonezzi, 2015). On the other side, many environmental
studies highlighted the environmental messages limits: there are many barriers
that would lessen the message effect on the consumer such as collapse porn
(Stoknes, 2014), the psychological distance (Spence, Poortinga, & Pidgeon,
2012)... T’he point is to understand which of these two kinds of behaviours would
eventually get the upper hand.
Methodology scope:
The study has been conducted through a long survey measuring the natural
resources depletion prediction credibility, the consumer’s reaction and changes in
behaviour when facing depletion prediction and policies implementation. This
questionnaire was also structured in four conditions randomly presented aiming at
measuring both the impact of the source between a pro-environmental and proindustry
source and the effect of time as a psychological distance for the
prediction. There has been a total amount of 186 participants to the study and the sample was located in Europe, with most respondents coming from France. After
cleaning the data, there were still 181 participations for the survey, which means
that each of our four conditions consisted in more than 30 participants.
Findings:
Overall people tend to be quite neutral towards water depletion predictions and
tend to believe oil depletion predictions a bit more. When natural resources
depletion predictions’ believability increases, then more sustainable behaviours
are said to be adopted by people, especially when it comes to basic water related
actions (flushing toilets, taking showers or baths, watering the garden).
Feeling an emotion toward a water depletion prediction has a more positive
impact on the prediction’s believability than feeling no emotion at all. When it
comes to feeling an emotion towards an oil depletion prediction, more sustainable
behaviours are adopted by the participants especially when those behaviours are
linked with transportation modes or buying local products.
The influence of time on on people’s believability towards predictions or change
of behaviour in response to policies implementation forecast cannot be depicted.
The source of the prediction also has an influence. Overall, predictions
implementation forecast about oil are more impactful when they come from
NGOs than when they come from industry groups. NGOs predictions increase
people’s believability and make them adopt more sustainable behaviours.
Overall when it comes to policies and behaviours ahead of the policies
implementations, we cannot depict any variable between time, emotion or source
which is statistically significant and could explain the influence of a variable on
the behaviours.
Contribution: This research, unlike prior studies, examines natural resources
depletion predictions and futures policies implementation.
In order to make people adopt more sustainable behaviours, they should first
believe in the natural resource depletion prediction they are facing. We cannot
depict a change of behaviour between the time the people hear about a future
policy implementation and the actual implementation.
Keywords: scarcity; natural resources; consumer behaviour; predictions; policies. | nb_NO |
