Understanding Consumer Attitudes Towards Sustainable Business Models - A Qualitative Study with Finnish Consumers

Sustainable business models have been presented in the literature as a way to gain stepwise improvements in environmental impact compared to just selling a product, and many companies have started experimenting with them. However, these models are not yet scaled up across sectors. One of the barriers is understanding how consumers perceive sustainable business models and how much they would be ready to pay products and services from sustainable offerings. To this extent, our study investigated the following research questions: How do consumers perceive the sustainability attributes of novel sustainable business models? How does this affect consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for the offering provided? This study uses a qualitative research approach, conducting online discussions among 44 Finnish consumers. Finland is in focus as it has a top ranking in sustainability country indexes. Through the study, it was found that consumers pay attention to sustainability of the products and services they consume. They are willing to use available information and assess this to make sustainable purchasing decisions. However, they lack trustworthy information and sometimes it is too time-consuming to find the data. When making purchasing decisions, consumers perceive certain positive environmental and social impacts. However, the environmental and social impact of the studied business models did not turn into consumer WTP especially when considering expensive products, or business models with a social impact only. Still, in general, over half of the participants are willing to pay more about responsible produced products.