Socio-demographical antecedents of responsible consumerism propensity

The paper analyses consumers’ propensity for socially and environmentally friendly products through socio-demographic indicators. Although the topic has been object of a wide literature, most of the previous studies suffered from methodological or sampling limitations. Hence, the present work addresses such limitations and proposes a study based on a wide heterogeneous sample of 5098 consumers, observed in their real settings. Results show the most responsible consumers are older, well-educated and wealthy, while gender is not a significant antecedent. The in-depth analysis of findings thus confirms the usefulness of socio-demographic variables to understand and determine the profile of responsible consumers. However, the study denies that the propensity to buy responsible products relates to the different sensitiveness of men and women, whereas it underlines that age, education and wealth have a positive relationship. Moreover, the analysis identifies four different profiles of consumer based on the different levels of propensity towards responsible products, which confirms the influence of the socio-demographic variables. This also allows identifying relevant indications on consumers’ decision making, useful to draw indications on possible effective marketing strategies for responsible products.