Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the consumers’ perception of sustainability and the application of a QR-code in stores with the focus on the information searching behavior regarding sustainable aspects. An online questionnaire was conducted with fashion students at Reutlingen University: in total, 65 students participated in the survey. Paired samples t-test and other statistical analyses were applied to test research questions. Apart from this, the research paper is based on a literature review. Furthermore, the decision was taken to use a projective method in the form of a dummy fashion fTRACE website. Key findings of the survey are that participants give sustainable aspects a higher importance with a QR-code than without one. Participants who prefer a product with detailed information experience a “positive shopping feeling” when provided with transparency via a QR-code. “Origin”, “production” and “quality” were rated of higher importance by those participants. These findings suggest that, transparency provided through the application of a QR-Code in stores influences the consumers’ perception of sustainability. Due to the small sample size of participants (65) in the study, findings of this research not generalizable to a larger population. This paper focused on the consumers’ information searching behavior regarding sustainable aspects, limiting its findings to impacts on perception of sustainability. Further research is therefore recommended.
Highlights
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the consumers’ perception of sustainability and the application of a QR-code in stores with the focus on the information searching behavior regarding sustainable aspects
The effect size for this analysis (d=.867) was found to exceed Cohen’s (1988) convention for a large effect (d=.80). These results indicate that participants in the ―preference‖ group (M=2.3137, s=.94848) experienced higher importance regarding production than did participants in the ―non-preference‖ group (M=3.2143, s=1.12171). there was no statistically significant difference between searching for information regarding ―social aspects‖ with a QR-Code of those who prefer a product with detailed information (M=1.6078, s=1.00625) to those participants who do not prefer a product with detailed information (M=2.7143 s=.99449), t(63)=1.646, p=.105, α=
The effect size for this analysis (d=.61) was not found to exceed Cohen’s (1988) convention (d=.80). These results indicate that participants who prefer a product with detailed information (M=1.6078, s=.60261) had statistically significant higher degrees of importance of searching for information than those participants who do not prefer a product with detailed information (M=2.000, s=.67937)
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the consumers’ perception of sustainability and the application of a QR-code in stores with the focus on the information searching behavior regarding sustainable aspects. ―Origin‖, ―production‖ and ―quality‖ were rated of higher importance by those participants These findings suggest that, transparency provided through the application of a QR-Code in stores influences the consumers’ perception of sustainability. The paper addresses the specific research objective to investigate the relationship between consumers’ perception of sustainability and the information searching behavior regarding sustainable aspects. In order to gain a profound understanding of transparency provided by a fashion fTRACE app and its impact on perception of sustainability a survey was conducted, which addresses the following research objectives: to compare the consumers’ degree of importance for information searching regarding sustainable aspects in general with and without a QR-code (Quick Response Code) to examine the consumers’ degree of importance for information searching regarding sustainable aspects with a QR-code when preferring a product with detailed information. We provide background information about the fTRACE app as wells
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