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What motivates smart consumption? – Using motivation profiles to support business planning

What helps us make smart choices that have a positive impact on the environment? This report introduces seven different motivation profiles that describe factors affecting consumption choices. They can be helpful with more customer-oriented business planning and for reaching the chosen target group in an engaging and meaningful way.

Writers

Sitra and Palmu

Published

As consumers, we Finns are quite different from each other. While some people’s decisions are motivated by ecological values and the earth’s capacity, others make their decisions to maximise their own pleasure or to cheer themselves up.

Making decisions is not a rational process, but rather a complex, partially unconscious chain of thought which involves motivations, values and attitudes, as well as many small factors connected with the context of daily life.

But although these background factors are numerous, there is one thing which unites us all as consumers: we want to be happy and to live a happy life. For some, a happy life means allotment gardening, local food, a shared house, vacations in Finland and services that help to distribute surplus food. For others, on the other hand, a happy life means five-star hotels, maximal floor heating, shopping therapy, a large detached house and services which bring a sprinkling of luxury to daily life.

Smart consumption is about thinking about both our own needs and the earth’s carrying capacity and the sufficiency of shared resources when we buy goods and services.

In the minds of many Finns, smart consumption is still only one fairly small motivating factor among many others. Based on the interviews we carried out, services for smart housing and transport are still hard to understand, access and purchase.

This study introduces seven different motivation profiles that describe factors affecting consumption choices. It consists of the profiles as well as tips on how to utilise them. They can be helpful for more customer-oriented business planning, for reflecting on products and services in the profile framework, wrapping them up while taking the customer into account and for reaching a chosen target group in an engaging and meaningful way.

Publication details

Title

What motivates smart consumption?

Subtitle

Using motivation profiles to support business planning

Authors

Sitra and Palmu

Place of publication

Helsinki

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Sitra

Outlook

52

ISBN (PDF)

978-952-347-093-4

ISSN (PDF)

1796-7112

Series

Sitra studies

Publication number

145

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