Consumers currently place increasing importance on the values that companies represent. Modern values such as transparency, benevolence to society, sustainability and fairness are becoming more relevant, as noted by many major consulting firms among which are Nielsen (2013), the World Federation of Advertisers (2013) and the Boston Consultancy Group (2013). Modern values are grounded in social, political and economic developments and represent the new values of this era. As a consequence, a company’s value to consumers no longer has to lie solely in its products and services. This new, broader scope of value may include the entire business process and organizational culture, ranging from the management’s integrity to values being found in the company’s contributions to society. Although the role of values in human behaviour has been extensively discussed in the psychology literature since the beginning of the 1900s (e.g. Feather 1995; Hofstede 1980; Olson and Maio 2003; Rokeach 1973; Schwartz 2012), limited attention has been dedicated to values in marketing literature. This was the conclusion of a systematic literature review that we conducted on this subject (Voorn et al. 2016). As a follow-up, we organized an online survey (n = 1109) to empirically investigate the role of values in the brand selection process. In this paper, we report on the relationship between values and brand purchase intentions through the concept of value congruence and in relation to several product categories representing services, durables and consumables. Overall, the results confirm the relevance of value congruence as a predictor of brand purchase, in particular in services and durables. Our study shows that companies can benefit from incorporating values into their marketing strategies, especially those values that are congruent with (higher-order) personal goals, rather than more (instrumental) category-specific values. This offers new marketing perspectives, especially for brands. Brands are – by definition – more than just one product or service, which means they can serve as an umbrella for the incorporation and propagation of new values. However, an important question remains for the brand manager: the extent to which values have an advantage over brand personality traits and functional attributes, since investing in values is not only about communication – it means that an organization needs to embody them in the very fibre of its being; otherwise it may be perceived as ‘green washing’, which can undermine brand trust.
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Citizen participation in local renewable energy projects is often promoted as many suppose it to be a panacea for the difficulties that are involved in the energy transition process. Quite evidently, it is not; there is a wide variety of visions, ideologies and interests related to an ‘energy transition’. Such a variety is actually a precondition for a stakeholder participation process, as stakeholder participation only makes sense if there is ‘something at stake’. Conflicting viewpoints, interests and debates are the essence of participation. The success of stakeholder participation implies that these differences are acknowledged, and discussed, and that this has created mutual understanding among stakeholders. It does not necessarily create ‘acceptance’. Renewable energy projects often give rise to local conflict. The successful implementation of local renewable energy systems depends on the support of the local social fabric. While at one hand decisions to construct wind turbines in specific regions trigger local resistance, the opposite also occurs! Solar parks sometimes create a similar variation: Various communities try to prevent the construction of solar parks in their vicinity, while other communities proudly present their parks. Altogether, local renewable energy initiatives create a rather chaotic picture, if regarded from the perspective of government planning. However, if we regard the successes, it appears the top down initiatives are most successful in areas with a weak social fabric, like industrial areas, or rather recently reclaimed land. Deeply rooted communities, virtually only have successful renewable energy projects that are more or less bottom up initiatives. This paper will first sketch why participation is important, and present a categorisation of processes and procedures that could be applied. It also sketches a number of myths and paradoxes that might occur in participation processes. ‘Compensating’ individuals and/or communities to accept wind turbines or solar parks is not sufficient to gain ‘acceptance’. A basic feature of many debates on local renewable energy projects is about ‘fairness’. The implication is that decision-making is neither on pros and cons of various renewable energy technologies as such, nor on what citizens are obliged to accept, but on a fair distribution of costs and benefits. Such discussions on fairness cannot be short cut by referring to legal rules, scientific evidence, or to standard financial compensations. History plays a role as old feelings of being disadvantaged, both at individual and at group level, might re-emerge in such debates. The paper will provide an overview of various local controversies on renewable energy initiatives in the Netherlands. It will argue that an open citizen participation process can be organized to work towards fair decisions, and that citizens should not be addressed as greedy subjects, trying to optimise their own private interests, but as responsible persons.
Reputation has often been proposed as the central mechanism that creates trust in the sharing economy. However, some sharing platforms that focus primarily on social rather than economically driven exchanges have managed to facilitate exchanges between users without the use of a reputation system. This could indicate that socially driven exchanges are in less need of reputation systems and that having sufficient trust is less problematic. We examine the effect of seller reputation on sales and price as proxies for trust, using a large dataset from a Dutch meal-sharing platform. This platform aims to stimulate social interactions between people via meal sharing. Multilevel regression analyses were used to test the association of reputation with trust. Our main empirical results are that reputation affects both sales and price positively, consistent with the existing reputation literature. We also found evidence of the presence of an information effect, i.e., the influence of reputation on sharing decreases when additional profile information is provided (e.g., a profile photo, a product description). Our results thus confirm the effectiveness of reputation in more socially driven exchanges also. Consequently, platform owners are advised to use reputation on their platform to increase sharing between its users.
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