E.A. van den Hende
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19 records found
1
Connecting consumers to production processes
A new pathway to sustainable behaviour
A growing body of research shows that consumers feel increasingly distant from the production processes of everyday commodities, particularly fast-moving consumer goods. Literature on psychological distance suggests that when individuals feel distant from events, such as climate change, their engagement and pro-environmental behaviour decline. However, while psychological distance has been widely studied, its application to production-consumption patterns remains unexplored. Moreover, despite numerous behavioural interventions, none address “distance from the production process” as a means of fostering sustainable consumption. Across three studies, one online and two laboratory experiments, this research explores how implicit and explicit packaging design interventions can frame production processes as either closer to or more distant from the consumer, and how such framings affect sustainability perceptions and disposal behaviour. Results demonstrate that short-distance framings enhance perceived packaging sustainability and encourage environmentally responsible disposal, directly or by strengthening consumers’ sense of connection to the production process. These findings highlight the role of design in connecting consumers to production processes as a novel and actionable pathway for sustainable behaviour.
Understanding Mental Book Value
Exploring Replacement Decisions and Lifetime Expectations
Consumer adoption of access-based product-service systems
The influence of duration of use and type of product
Access-based product-service systems (AB-PSS) are business models that can potentially decouple the satisfaction of consumer needs from environmental impacts. Hence, they have been promoted for the circular economy. Their sustainability potential has not yet been realised because consumer adoption is lagging. Although this challenge has been studied for two decades, knowledge to identify and address AB-PSS adoption barriers that matter to consumers is lacking. We hypothesise that the duration of use, the time a consumer obtains exclusive access to a specific product (short-term vs. long-term) and the type of product (bicycles vs. clothing) moderate the importance of AB-PSS adoption barriers to consumers. We compared several adoption barriers across four AB-PSS and found that the duration of use and the type of product significantly moderated the importance of some AB-PSS adoption barriers. More specifically, the Effort to access has a higher influence on consumer preference for short-term AB-PSS, whereas Product quality has a higher influence on consumer preference for long-term AB-PSS. We also found that Effort to access and Product characteristics were more important for bicycle AB-PSS, whereas Contamination and Product quality were more important for clothing AB-PSS. These insights help companies to identify and design out key AB-PSS consumer adoption barriers.
Barriers to the adoption of waste-reducing eco-innovations in the packaged food sector
A study in the UK and the Netherlands
The food processing sector has a considerable environmental impact, due to large volumes of food and packaging waste. Eco-innovations present an important opportunity to reduce this impact. Yet, initial insights suggest that new technologies face considerable challenges to their adoption. The eco-innovation adoption literature has overlooked the food processing sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers inhibiting the adoption of waste reducing eco-innovations in the food processing sector. We present four detailed case studies of new technologies at different stages of adoption in the UK and Netherlands. The findings reveal ten barriers to the adoption of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector. The barriers identified include concerns over the influence of technologies on the product's characteristics, its retailing, and a perceived lack of consumer demand. These barriers arise from the powerful influence of retailers within the food supply chain, the influence of technologies on in-store point of sale displays, and the need for distribution trials. We conclude that the adoption of new technologies requires simultaneous acceptance by both food processor and retailers. The paper provides recommendations for policy makers and innovation managers to increase the adoption and diffusion of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector, as well as implications for future research.
There's More Than One Perspective to Take Into Account for Successful Customer Integration Into Radical New Product Innovation
A Framework and Research Agenda
Digitalised product-service systems
Effects on consumers’ attitudes and experiences
Access-based product-service systems (AB-PSS) allow consumers to use products for a fee and might support the transition towards a circular economy. This type of business model could decrease negative impacts of consumption by reducing the number of products needed; either by extending products’ lifetimes or by intensifying the use of products. Many AB-PSS in consumer markets are highly digitalised; they utilise digital platforms, have sensors embedded in the products, and rely on users’ smartphones. To better understand how digitalisation impacts consumers’ attitudes and use experiences in mobility AB-PSS, we applied a mixed-methods approach consisting of a survey (n=47) and interviews (n=10). Our findings suggest that many short-term AB-PSS, such as bicycle sharing, owe their recent success to digitalisation. Further, consumers’ digital confidence influences their attitude towards short-term AB-PSS. During the use of AB-PSS, users value the convenience and flexibility enabled by the digital aspects. Digitalisation also made short-term mobility AB-PSS susceptible to disruptions because the AB-PSS rely on the functioning of many digital aspects. Users seem to dislike phoning customer service and increasingly depend on their smartphones. We also provide a brief outlook of what 5G mobile networks might imply for mobility AB-PSS. With this paper, we contribute a consumer perspective on the digitalisation of services. Our findings help service designers, user experience designers, and app developers to design digitalised AB-PSS for consumer markets.
What Happens in Vegas Stays on TripAdvisor?
A Theory and Technique to Understand Narrativity in Consumer Reviews
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.
Drivers and Consequences of Narrative Transportation
Understanding the Role of Stories and Domain-Specific Skills in Improving Radically New Products
When Should Large Firms Collaborate with Young Ventures
Understanding young firms’ strengths can help firms make the right decisions around asymmetric collaborations.