The article ‘Do consumers care about ethical-luxury?’ is an interesting research by Iain A. Davies, Zoe Lee and Ine Ahonkhai, which explores consumers’ propensity to consider ethics in luxury purchases in comparison with commodity purchases. The authors define the paper as a considerable starting point into the underexplored field of ethical-luxury with an important attention to consumers’ decision-making processes. However, the overall research results to be problematic and not substantially robust on different points. Therefore, this analysis will be developed through a critique of 3 main areas: its conceptual validity, the research methods and the research’s implication.
Davies et al.(2012)’s literature review focuses on the growth of ethical consumption amongst consumers, which has been found to offer a disproportionate focus on commoditised products with little evidence on the ethical-luxury market.
The authors’ evaluation of such literature gap is clearly explained and induces the development of 3 exploratory research questions, which investigate how consumers perceive ethics in commodities versus luxury purchases, if there is any change in the intensity with which they are perceiving it and what could be the factors behind ethical-luxury’s slow growth.
To address such questions the authors conducted 199 structured interviews of 25 minutes on the main shopping streets of two UK cities. The researchers have defined the results as ‘relatively simple to understand’, however they reveal different lacunas on key areas.
The first issue discussed in this critique is the conceptual validity of the paper. Throughout the research there is no definition of the term ‘ethical’ that lies at the very core of the study. In the current literature ethics is defined in a variety of terms which can be summarised in ‘the conception of what is right and fair conduct or behaviour (Carroll, 1991; Freeman and Gilbert, 1988) and as ‘a system of value principles or practices and a definition of right and wrong (Raiborn and Payne, 1990). Based on this understanding of ethics, the reader could find the authors’ approach quite confusing. As a matter of fact, the authors state that the research is mainly focused on supply-chain ethics, however on the limitation section the authors comment that the paper’s attention is on ‘ethical conditions of production’ which has a smaller scope compared to ethical supply-chain. Moreover they explain that ‘further study may find other environmental or social issues may be more important in luxury purchases’ which lead to the assumption that social issues are not considered in the research which are yet a key part in supply-chain ethics.
In addition, another term is lacking a consistent definition: ‘luxury’. Luxury is defined to the interviewees as any purchase they consider ‘high value, irregular and for self-pleasure’. Evidently, such definition is too vague and broad in its nature to guarantee precise results. As a further matter, the authors create an initial confusion with the imprecise definition of the brand Garnier as a ‘luxury cosmetic firm’, which is actually a mass-market brand(Garnier, 2016). As a result, the unclear terminology used around the key concept of ‘ethics’ and ‘luxury’ could potentially lead to a flawed understanding of the phenomenon.
Thirdly, broadening the approach to consumers as a one homogeneous group could cause a further misunderstanding of the ethical purchase dynamics. The study would have been far more persuasive if the authors had focus on a particular population’s segment, avoiding the potential dilution of the findings’ exactitude and relevance. Additionally, Davies et al. affirm that customers’ willingness to pay for ethical products decreases in more expensive items. However, in supporting this point they compare Elliott and Freeman (2001) findings with McGoldrick and Freestone (2008) results, which could be misleading as both studies are carried out with really different methodologies and scopes. In fact Elliott’s sample relies on a ‘ small number of randomly chosen persons in the US in 1999′ (Elliott and Freeman, 2001) which is not much comparable to McGoldrick and Freestone(2008) which accessed a sample of 998 UK respondents.
The second concern around this paper is based on the research strategy adopted by the authors that can be defined as problematic due to the sample used, the framework adopted and the data collection.
Starting with the sample, 199 people is a limited number to have a solid outcome that can represent a credible spectrum of the population. The gender split is unbalance with a 63.8% female respondents versus 36.2% males, and almost 60% of the sample have a income lower than £40.000 a year which clearly limit the accessibility of this group to luxury purchases of any kind, ethical or not. Furthermore, focusing on just two unstated UK cities could greatly narrow the relevance of such article. According to Cervellon and Carey (2011), such limited focus could be detrimental for the lack of cross-cultural appreciation as ‘study on sustainable and ethical fashion tends to be culture-bound’.
Secondly, the questionnaire’s structure is divided in four sections that present several limitations. The first part is based on self-disclosed data such as household income, which cannot be verified and are affected by social desirability bias (Auger and Devinney, 2007). The second section explores the differences between commodities versus luxury purchase. Considering the already unclear definition of ethical-luxury, the authors created an additional bias at the very beginning of the questionnaire as they selected people who were defined as ‘the commodity product decision-makers’, completely overlooking their luxury purchases behaviour, which creates an unbalance experience of ethics in favour of ethical-commodities. The third section explored the lack of ethical-luxury purchase compared to ethical-commodities in the market. The construction of the question itself could have an influence on consumers’ answer as they are already focusing on ‘the lack of’ something instead of evaluating their own experience. The final part explores moral intensity towards ethics using Jones (1991)’s framework based on ‘the individual’s evaluation of six characteristics of the moral issues’ (Miner and Petocs, 2003). Such model, however, have been challenged by many writers on the grounds that ‘early studies provide partial or weak support for the model’ (Dukerich et al., 1993; Jones and Huber, 1992; Jalajas, 1993) and ‘recent studies fail to find consistent support’ for two components of such framework. (Miner and Petocs, 2003).
The final challenge around the research strategy is based on the data collection, which is recorded through note-taking instead of recording speech. Due to the nature of street-interviews, note writing could have negative consequences on data collection. According to Muswazi (2013:16) ‘the inability to capture all detail as well as its disruptive tendencies in interviews, have been cited as major disadvantages to the researcher and may be even to the participants as well’.
The last critique to Davies et al.’s paper highlights the presence of incomplete information and the lack of current data to support the final conclusion.
The authors address ‘the mounting evidence of unethical practises’ in the luxury market with a tendency to give relevance to certain data over others, presenting an unbalanced scenario in order to support the research’s findings, which unfortunately lead to a series of imprecise and incomplete information. Starting with the reference to the owner of Louis Vuitton and TAGHeur as LVMW when the correct name is LVMH. A potentially harmless mistake which can however create an overall sense of inaccuracy for the reader. The information is incomplete as the authors report LVMH ‘being de-listed from the FTSE4Good index’ in 2006 for ‘poor compliance with supply chain requirement.’ However they forget to mention that in 2009, LVMH invested in Edun, which describes itself as a ‘socially conscious clothing company’ that aims to foster sustainable employment in developing countries (Bellaiche J. et al., 2010). From the same token, LVMH created the ‘Special Days’ initiative to provide transparency regarding production (Kapferer, 2014). Moreover the use of the FTSE4Good as an indicator of ‘good or ‘bad’ practise could be easily refuted as this ethical indices has been criticised to not be sufficiently transparent. In fact, as reported by the Institute of Business Ethics (2013) such indices ‘are designed for companies with specific internal structure’ , favouring those with ‘the greatest capacity to respond to the questionnaires rather than those with the best socially responsible practise’, being ‘a reflections of a successful marketing than proven sustainability performance’ .
The research findings indicate that consumers’ propensity to consider ethical-luxury is significantly lower compared to ethical commoditised purchase. Moreover the authors consider ‘unlikely that ethical luxuries will ever be as universally successful’. This is a bold statement that reveals the probable limited authors’ understanding or awareness of current data, that consider ethical and sustainable luxury as an important consumer revolution. In fact, according to Kapferer (2014) ‘customers have very marked expectations with respect to the sustainable orientation of luxury brands’ as ‘sustainability has become an implicit need’. Such judgment could be proven to be more solid than Davies et al’s paper as Kapferer’s investigation is based on a more robust sample of 966 luxury customers which can potentially have a more insightful understanding of the luxury market. The frailty of the results is further confirmed by the contrast with Cervellon and Shammas’ international research sustaining that ethical behaviours are ‘perceived now by consumers as a complementary model to luxury, especially among the wealthy’ (Cervellon and Shammas, 2013). Indeed luxury consumers extremely value sustainable and ethical luxury and as a result, both ‘not doing harm’ and ‘doing good’ (Minor and Morgan 2011) are now ‘expected by luxury consumers’ (Cervellon, 2013).
To conclude, I.A. Davies et al. carried an important and underexplored research around ethical-luxury, which resulted to be a relevant and worthwhile topic for both consumers and businesses, which can inspire further explorations. Unfortunately, the opacity at the very core of this analysis can result in a misunderstanding between the researcher, the interviewees and the reader. The lacunas in the methodologies used and the vagueness around core concepts create a limited use of the research’s findings and a need for additional in-depth evaluation of such conclusions.