Hannah Christmann

Hannah Christmann is a master student at the WWU Muenster, currently finishing her master’s degree in marketing and management with a focus on brand and sustainability management. She has two bachelor’s degrees in Management and Economics and Cultural Studies.

The world faces fundamental environmental challenges to address, such as climate change, resource depletion and waste pollution. Consumer goods product packaging contributes a considerable amount to that, as it becomes redundant after usage. Luckily, research shows that the awareness of the importance of sustainable packaging has increased during the last years, both for consumers and the industry. Hence, it becomes indispensable to gain knowledge of the factors influencing consumers adoption and choice for sustainably packaged products.

To this end, the present research aims at filling this gap by empirically testing how much consumers are willing to pay for sustainable packaging. So far, research focuses on outcomes such as purchase intentions and attitudes, however this may differ from actual choice behavior. The development and production of sustainable packaging comes with additional costs, and manufacturers will at least partially pass them on to the consumer in order to stay competitive. This makes willingness to pay (WTP) a key metric for the acceptance of sustainable packaging. Building on the adapted definition of the Sustainable Packaging Alliance, the four layers of sustainable packaging - effective, efficient, cyclic, and safe - and their influence on WTP are examined. To this end, a choice-based conjoint analysis and the Van Westendorp Price- Sensitivity Meter and their results are compared in a real context in order to rule out the possible influence of a hypothetical bias.

Elicited WTP ranges from 3.00€ to 9.00€, depending on which and how many sustainable packaging attributes are fulfilled. More specifically, consumers are willing to spend 0.77€ for effective, 0.79€ for efficient, 0.90€ for cyclic and 1.60€ for safe more. This also indicates the different value consumers attach to each attribute. Additionally, research is able to define market segments, that can be specifically targeted by firms. Plus, results prove that practical direct approaches like the PSM are able to provide the same results as advanced statistical tools like conjoint analysis. Even more, PSM approaches are able to quantify diminishing returns, thus depicting WTP differences more realistically.

Results help firms to gain a better understanding of the diversity of consumer demand for sustainability and align their efforts with consumer preferences.