GlobeScan has been tracking consumer expectations towards business in society for a number of years. We routinely find that the global public have the highest expectations of companies around their core operational responsibilities – the safety of their products and services, how they treat the environment, and how they treat their workforce and supply chain. We have also noted a major increase in consumer expectations around transparency in recent years.
Looking at the various stages of the product lifecycle for clothing manufacturers, we find that expectations in the UK and USA are fully in line with this global picture. Consumer expectations are highest around a company‘s level of transparency with its customers about the social and environmental impact of its products, which is regarded as ‘very important‘ by over half of both UK and US consumers. In both countries, the second most important consideration is about a company’s social and environmental responsibility itself.
Expectations around the way it sources its fabrics, and its responsibilities to educate the public around caring for and disposing for their clothes are currently less well developed.
But this underlines the key task for companies in communicating with consumers – to meet consumers’ demand for reliable information. People want reliable, verifiable information presented in an accessible way, to allow them to make informed choices.
Finding from the GlobeScan Radar, Wave 1, 2011
This post was written by former GlobeScan Research Director, Sam Mountford.
