The question from my last poll was whether you thought that CSR / Sustainability activities where influencing your decision which product to buy or not to buy. This is the link to the post about the poll question.
The Result
The result (details in the chart below) show that the users that answered this poll where strongly influenced by the CSR / Sustainability practices by the company (58% of votes). They where also willing to pay more for these products at the same time.
But this result also shows that there are also significant doubts when it comes to the price of the product in question. 29% percent of the people that voted where price conscious first and then looked at the CSR / Sustainability practice of this company once they agreed that the price was what they wanted to spent.
What Does this Result Mean?
Obviously we need to take into account that the majority of the audience that answered are in some way of the other more sustainability conscious then the general public. This is just the nature of my network of people to whom I asked this question and this means that the audience was a little biased towards the “Yes” answer.
So taking this into account what is the learning from this poll?
It is fair to say that our purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by the CSR / Sustainability practices. Why would anyone for example not buy from a company that took extra care of their employees and suppliers, was open takes actions to minimize its environmental impact and communicated in an open and honest way with their stakeholders.
But and this is a HUGE but, the deciding factor for every consumer is whether this product from the more responsible company is not more expensive then the comparing brand.
This is in my opinion the main reason for companies to not advertise their CSR / Sustainability practices more. Because it so far does not sell more then doing it the way it has always been done. This is very sad but reality unfortunately.