Please see below selected recent consumption-related change.
See also:
May 2022
- The secondhand apparel economy is growing at a rapid rate as consumers increasingly embrace used goods. Driving this expansion is the growth in resale, which is primarily concerned with high-quality items. While marketplaces have led the trend, brands and retailers are investing in resale-as-a-service and recommerce tech solutions to launch their own resale channels.
March 2022
- Consumers are increasingly pushing for sustainable business practices in retail, driving businesses to reassess what they produce, and how. From ingredient upcycling to plastic alternatives to smart trash cans, CB Insights analysed the technologies placing sustainability at the center of retail products and processes. Fashion generates over 92m metric tons of waste every year, while global food waste totals around 1.6bn metric tons. It’s no secret that industries in the retail sector are some of the most wasteful and polluting in the world and consumers are increasingly demanding change.
July 2021
- A report from the Finnish scientific journal Environmental Research Letters compared the global warming potential of different shopping models, from the classic cycle (buy new, use for a while, bin), to reuse models like second-hand shops, to rental. It found the renting model is the least sustainable, as the extensive packaging, relentless cleaning and constant transportation between renters, made this model much more carbon intensive than alternatives.
January 2021
- Consumers’ expectations are continually evolving, but there has been a dramatic acceleration in certain trends as a result of the pandemic. Increasingly, consumers expect to access goods and services online and, having made greater use of virtual channels in 2020, they may buy less from traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses 2021 and beyond. Another important change relates to purpose. As highlighted in the EY Future Consumer Index, even before the pandemic struck, many consumers were already favouring products that aligned with their sense of purpose. Now they are even more committed to consuming in a purposeful way, with others choosing to consume purposefully for the first time.
December 2020
- In 2021, our algorithmically-fuelled consumerism continues to double-down on what it does best. That is, serving our little selves. Arguably the greatest opportunity of the 2020s, then? Tapping into, communing with, and serving the other side of human beings, which wants to reach beyond everyday life, and to some higher vision of what a person can be. Serving the unlimited self. We might ask: where is the Nike of this great project, asked New World, Same Humans.
- The notion of human beings as consumers first took shape before World War One, but became commonplace in America in the 1920s. Consumption is now frequently seen by some as our principal role in the world. People, of course, have always "consumed" the necessities of life – food, shelter, clothing - and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th Century, argued the BBC.
October 2020
- David Attenborough identified the “excesses the capitalist system has brought us” as the root of environmental ills. Rather than apportioning blame to humans everywhere, Attenborough singled out the resource-intensive lifestyles enjoyed by the world’s wealthiest consumers. His comments echo a number of recent studies that have quantified the disproportionate impact of consumers in the Global North. According to a report from Oxfam, the richest one per cent of the world was responsible for more than double the carbon pollution emitted than that emitted by the poorest half between 1990 and 2015. During this 25-year window, humanity doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a report published this summer in Nature Communications, an international group of scientists identified consumption by the globally affluent as “by far the strongest determinant and the strongest accelerator” of global environmental impacts.
April 2020
- Appealing to teens these days is as important as ever for businesses. Gen Z makes up 40% of global consumers today, with about $150 billion in spending power in the US alone, according to McKinsey.
December 2019
November 2019
- While consumers traditionally carried home the goods they bought at shops - making them a part of a supply chain - products increasingly show up on our doorsteps shortly after we’ve made a few clicks online. However, online retail has succeeded in making us shop more while thinking less about how our purchases reach us, even as they exert an unseen, transformative pressure on cities, infrastructure, and companies themselves.
- Consumers may start to seek an antidote to vast and often toxic online communities and social media platforms and embrace smaller and more intimate digital spaces that facilitate respectful and meaningful connections and let them interact with like-minded peers (and perhaps also those with alternative views).
October 2019
- Many customers are increasingly passionate about the products they buy and passionate about the brands they buy from. And with two out of every three shoppers in some countries now considered to be a 'belief-driven buyer', companies would be wise to take notice, as ignoring the reasons behind conscious consumerism could damage sales and reputations. However, with a large number of customers still ranking price as the single biggest factor in their purchase decisions, retailers are being pressured to be more ethical and sustainable in their practices -for the same amount of money.
September 2019
July 2019
- As global connectivity soars, generational shifts could come to play a more important role in setting behaviour than socioeconomic differences do. Young people have become a potent influence on people of all ages and incomes, as well as on the way those people consume and relate to brands. In Brazil, Gen Z (people born between 1995 and 2010) already makes up 20% of the country’s population. McKinsey believes all companies should be attuned to three implications for this generation: consumption as access rather than possession, consumption as an expression of individual identity, and consumption as a matter of ethical concern.
June 2019
- Further reading:
April 2019
- The $3 trillion+ global apparel industry.accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions and has been the second largest industrial polluter, second only to oil. Nearly 70 million barrels of oil are used each year to make the world’s polyester fibew, which is now the most commonly used fibre in our clothing. But it takes more than 200 years to decompose. More than 150 billion garments are produced annually, enough to provide 20 new garments to every person on the planet, every year, according to Forbes.
- Despite the efforts of brands and watchdog groups, stories of abused workers earning poverty wages routinely surface in the global garment industry. One organsation that has worked on the problem for 20 years believes the issue isn’t any one company or practice, but the business model the industry operates on. Until that changes, noted Quartz, the millions of dollars brands spend on corporate responsibility programs are treating symptoms but ignoring the disease.
- Indeed, Quartz also pointed to an Indian factory supplying a number of well-known brands, where workers said they were viciously beaten for daring to join a union, researchers for an aid group who found that garment workers in Bangladesh and Vietnam making clothes for big international labels were paid so little they couldn’t adequately feed themselves and female garment workers in Vietnam who face “systemic” sexual harassment and violence at work.
March 2019
- Many customers these days are a passionate bunch, claimed Raconteur: they’re passionate about the products they buy and passionate about the brands they buy from. And with two out of every three shoppers now considered to be a ‘belief-driven buyer’, companies would be wise to take notice, as ignoring the reasons behind conscious consumerism could damage sales and reputations.
December 2018
- Working through cheap, disposable clothing is ever easier thanks to low-cost brands, but it’s also wasteful and feeds an industry rife with harsh labour conditions and environmentally unsustainable practices, leading some to give up fast fashion.
- For thousands of children in the cocoa fields of West Africa, chocolate is a source of hard, sometimes hazardous, work and the the link between child labour and chocolate is a long-standing one, warned Raconteur. Reports of under-age minors being made to work in cocoa-producing countries date back two decades or more. According to the 2018 Cocoa Barometer, a report by 15 European non-profit organisations, as many as 2.1 million child labourers are working in West Africa alone.
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