Projektakademie: Sustainable buyer behavior in the value chain: determinants and marketing implications

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Guido Grunwald
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2018 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419736677

Changing consumer behavior is attributed a high potential for promoting sustainable development. But it is not only at the end of the value chain that buyers, through their product choice and use, decide whether and to what extent contributions are made for sustainable development. At upstream stages of the value chain, purchase and post-purchase decisions become the premise for other players and thus influence sustainability in the value chain as a whole. The previous research on sustainable buyer behavior, however, unilaterally focuses on determinants of sustainable consumption at the last stage of the value chain, while looking at the internal processes along the value chain (e. g. adjustment mechanisms, stakeholder relationships and power relations) as a black box. However, following such a limited approach may fail in detecting potential causes for missing impulses of a sustainable buyer behavior further up in the supply chain (such as limited knowledge of product uses or alternatives) as well as possible bottom-up phenomena in the value chain (such as information deficits). This research project therefore aims to empirically investigate which factors influence sustainable purchase and post-purchase behavior at different stages of the value chain. On the one hand, it is asked how the potential gap between merely expressed and actual sustainable buyer behavior can be explained from the perspective of various actors in the value chain by drawing on theories and concepts of behavioral psychology. On the other hand, it is asked how this gap can be reduced or avoided. For this purpose, this so-called behavioral gap at different stages of the value chain of upstream and downstream actors (manufacturers - downstream users, downstream users - retailers, retailers - end users) is empirically investigated. On this basis, starting points for overcoming (avoiding and reducing) the behavioral gap at different levels of value creation are derived by systematically influencing the behavior of the respective actors in the value chain as part of a sustainability-oriented marketing. Here, the focus is on multi-level marketing and in particular multi-level supply chain communication which subsumes all marketing or communication measures that a provider addresses to its customers' customers which has been widely ignored by empirical research in marketing science. Taking into account the respective stakeholder relationships in the value chain, it is thus also possible to create step-by-step incentives for sustainable buying behavior.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants