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When it comes to luxury goods the circular economy has a problem, at least from a marketing perspective, according to QUT research which has found that language matters when promoting sustainable premium products to consumers.
In the world of high-end retail, words such as “recycled”, “sustainable” and “eco-friendly” apparently are a turn-off despite major brands demonstrating a desire to produce goods in a more sustainable way.
As part of an ongoing series on the circular economy, Business News Australia spoke with PhD researcher Emma Joenpolvi, the lead author of the QUT study, to find out what luxury brands can do to better engage with the discerning consumer and drive more desirable sustainability outcomes among big spenders.
“Luxury and sustainability don’t often go hand in hand purely because luxury is often about consumption, whereas sustainability is all about producing, recycling and consuming in moderation,” says Joenpolvi, who undertook the study with fellow researchers from QUT’s School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations.
“There is an inherent conflict between those two concepts and consumers know this.”
Joenpolvi, who has several research projects in train delving into sustainable consumption, says the recent study shows that perception is everything when it comes to consumer appetite for luxury goods.
“Most people would say a circular economy is a good thing but it’s also about how it is applied and whether consumers believe it,” she says.
“What we found in our research is that if we use words like renewable, or eco-friendly it actually reduces consumer engagement.
“For some reason consumers don’t believe these words when they are used in luxury advertising.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers of these goods are less conscious of the importance of sustainably produced goods.
“For some people it is incredibly important but there are also people who don’t consider this important,” says Joenpolvi.
The peer-reviewed QUT study, titled Driving Consumer Engagement for Circular Luxury Products: Two Large Field Studies on the Role of Regulatory Mode Language, was published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
The research team, which also included QUT’s Associate Professor Frank Mathmann and Professor Gary Mortimer, largely focused on second-hand luxury clothing site Vestiaire Collective, a French company that operates an online marketplace for “pre-loved fashion”.
The platform hosts about five million items across 12,000 brands with about 35,000 new items added daily, making it the world's largest collection of used luxury and designer fashion.
The QUT researchers undertook two field studies that considered almost a million product listings on the Vestiaire Collective site as well as Facebook posts by luxury car brands.
They compared consumer engagement of product descriptions that mention sustainability or circular economy with products that make no mention of sustainable features at all. The researchers used the level of likes and shares as a measure of consumer reactions and behaviour.
'Likes plummeted to zero'
“We found that posts with descriptions that used sustainable product language to promote the circularity of their luxury products resulted in a decrease in consumer engagement compared with other products,” says Joenpolvi.
“For example, a random selection of three product listings on Vestiaire Collective with no mention of sustainability factors had between 492 and 853 ‘likes’, however, when the posts explicitly mentioned ‘recycled’, the likes plummeted to zero.”
Joenpolvi points out that there are academic reasons showing that if recycled material is used in luxury goods, people are unlikely to buy it.
“But when you make it obvious, people tend to like it less,” she says.
“There’s a clear contrast between products that don’t mention anything about sustainability, recyclability or circular economy, compared to the descriptions that specifically mention it.”
The solution to this frustrating issue, says the researcher, is as simple as changing the messaging.
“We figured out that if you are using sustainable product language the best strategy is to match that with consumers’ expectations of what luxury can be which is progressive and innovative,” says Joenpolvi.
“Using that as a ridge you can then further engage consumers back into the conversation of sustainability.”
Joenpolvi says circular luxury product descriptions were more effective when they used progress-focused language, mainly words such as “reduce”, “change” or “make”.
“When we then looked at listings for sustainability-backed products that achieved likes above the average likes, we found that they used progress-focused language that frames the product in a process of moving forward.
“For example, words and language like ‘make’, ‘dynamic’, ‘get’, ‘fast’, ‘flow’, ‘launch’ generated greater consumer engagement with circular and sustainable luxury brand claims, than using words like ‘recycled’, ‘sustainable’, ‘eco-friendly’, ‘green’, source-to-sea’ and ‘closing material cycles’ alone.”
The researchers found similar results in posts for luxury cars with those that included progress-focused language about sustainability achieving well above the average shares on Facebook for each brand.
“The posts that mentioned their luxury cars had ‘sustainable materials’, ‘eco-friendly materials’ or were fighting ‘plastic pollution’ achieve dismal shares, such as just 6 per cent of the average shares for that brand,” says Joenpolvi.
While circular economy practices are being adopted across the spectrum of industry sectors, Joenpolvi points out that luxury brands also have a role to play in reducing their environmental impact.
Spearheading a change
“Luxury brands are well-positioned to spearhead a change to circular business models due to their prominent positioning in their respective industries,” she says.
“At the end of the day, they are the trend setters, they are the brands that people admire, the brands that really lead the way.
Joenpolvi urges these brands to take such matters very seriously in making sure their agendas align with with the circular economy and the sustainable agenda.
“In saying that, there are challenges with this and my recommendation, based on our research, would be to align their messaging with what consumers think is appropriate with luxury brands.
“This means focusing on progress, focusing on their innovativeness and making sure they package the idea of sustainability nicely with the kind of concepts that consumers already associate with luxury.”
Joenpolvi not only sees the circular economy as a critical pathway towards a more sustainable lifestyle overall, but also as an economic imperative.
“It would be incredibly short-sighted for companies not to see it any other way. Most companies see long-term value not only for their bottom line but also for the environment.
“I am very optimistic about where big brands and big companies are headed, and also at the smaller end of the scale where there are a lot of brands working in this space and leading the way.”
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