To be or not to be sustainable in an emerging market? Conjoint analysis of customers' behavior in purchasing denim jeans

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate to what extent sustainable and nonsustainable attributes can be used to characterize different clusters of consumers in an emerging market, where economic conditions can increase the relevance of price. Consumers seem reluctant to engage frequently in pro-sustainable behavior, mainly for financial reasons. However, purchasing decisions can be understood as a multidimensional process. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted quantitative and descriptive research employing a choice-based conjoint/hierarchical Bayes (CBC/HB) experiment in malls in a low-income city in northeast Brazil with 1,287 potential buyers of denim jeans. The conjoint analysis therefore collected data on preferences in the course of actual decision-making. The authors then took the individual part-utility from each respondent and ran a cluster analysis to identify similar groups in the sample. The classification and regression tree (CART) method was used to determine the relationship between the conjoint attributes and the sociodemographic characteristics. Findings: The data demonstrate that buying decisions constitute a complex process of interplay between many different factors, often involving trade-offs between a wide variety of nonsustainable and sustainable attributes. The survey confirmed that price is still of paramount importance when it comes to consumer choices. The authors also found that sustainable attributes played a relatively more significant role than brand or origin of production. The authors identify notable differences between groups of consumers in the “pro-sustainable” and “non-pro-sustainable” clusters and different levels of importance regarding the sociodemographic characteristics. Originality/value: Although price emerged as the most significant attribute, the research also demonstrates that there is a market in Brazil for products and practices based on a genuine commitment to the natural environment and social issues. The findings suggest that marketing managers and policymakers should consider different combinations of concerns over sustainability with product attributes and include sociodemographic variables rather than considering the textile market as uniform or thinking that there is no space for sustainability in fashion.