Felix Arenz

Felix Arenz is a master's student of Sports Management M.Sc. at the University of Leipzig. He holds a B.A. degree in media, sports and event management. Felix is fascinated by the topics of sports and sustainability. For this reason, he combines these topics in his master's thesis, which examines consumer preferences when buying sustainable running shoes.

With Sawtooth Software, he will use an Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis (ACBC) to estimate consumer preferences regarding their purchase intentions for running shoes. The focus will be on environmental and social attributes to make the relevance of sustainable attributes measurable in a purchase decision.

The results of 323 respondents show that price is ranked as more important than sustainable product features. Furthermore, the results confirm an inconsistency between environmental attitudes and actual purchasing behavior, as respondents overwhelmingly classify themselves as environmentally conscious. In addition, green consumer value, perceived environmental knowledge, concern about greenwashing (strong effect), gender, product knowledge, and runner level (weak effect) have a moderating influence on preference for sustainable product attributes. Accordingly, female users who are well-informed about the product, go running once a week, have a higher value for environmentally conscious consumers, have higher environmental knowledge, and are more concerned about greenwashing are more receptive to sustainable product attributes.

These results will give sporting goods manufacturers better insight into the extent to which consumers value sustainable running shoes and which attributes consumers say are most important. This can be used by companies to adapt their products to changing consumer behavior in the textile and sports industry.