Data collection

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the answers people give to a question, thus it is necessary for the moderator to always keep it in mind to stay as objective as possible and don’t involve too much in the topics.

On the other hand, semi-structured interviews have some limitations. The main drawback of this type of data collection arises from the number of subjects within the research. Normally conducting data with using semi-structured interviews requires high amount of resources such as time and moderator, thus the number of participants is usually low. Although this allows the researcher to gain deep understanding of each individual, the representativeness of the study is low, therefore the findings can hardly (or not at all) be applied to the population and be generalized. Another limitation is due to the necessary knowledge and experience of the interviewer. As briefly touched upon before, the moderator who conducts the interview can influence the subjects even with an incorrectly phrased question, causing in unreliable results.

In cases when the interviewers are not well-qualified and experienced, this problem can occur.

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to see their opinion about sustainability, but also to understand their actual actions. Therefore, this block of the interview tries to elaborate what consumers actually think about sustainability, how they perceive this topic and also aims to understand their purchase behaviour in order to gain more understanding of the attitude – behaviour gap. The interview then continues to formulate questions to cover topics like how the consumers decide between sustainable and non-sustainable household products, what is the regularity of their purchase behaviour, what barriers they see that is stopping them form purchasing sustainable products, and how differently they act when purchasing sustainable cleaning products compared to when they are shopping regular products.

The second block of the interview guide was created by using the Individual Self driver of the SHIFT model. This section starts with exploring what is the consumers’ self-concept towards sustainable consumption, as people usually try to maintain a positive self-concept, and a certain way of consuming goods can help them with this (White et al., 2019). Then the interview guide moves on to find out about consumers’ self-interest regarding this consumption and their functional perspective by touching points like the different attributes that the consumers look for when choosing household products. Self-efficacy and self-compromise are also researched during this block of the interview by exploring the importance of these attributes and how much the consumers are willing to sacrifice and compromise from these by choosing sustainable home hygiene products.

The third part of the interview focuses on the second driver from the SHIFT model that was deemed as key driver, the Feelings and Cognition. The first part of this section is about asking the consumers to imagine a certain situation that is described to them by the moderators, and explain what they would do or react and why. This part of the interview guide was designed to research the effect of strong negative and positive emotions on consumers’ attitude and purchase behaviour towards sustainable home hygiene products. Strong negative emotions often come off as too strong for consumers, resulting in the opposite effect as what the marketeer wants to achieve with it (White et al., 2019). Three negative emotions, fear, guilt and sadness are highlighted within the SHIFT model, and their impact on consumers is

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discussed, thus the interview continues with investigating anticipated and collective guilt.

According to the SHIFT model (White et al., 2019), consumers are more likely to engage in sustainable behaviour if they can achieve some kind of positive emotion from it. In order to explore the effect of these emotions, the interview guide touches the topic of collective positive emotion, exploring the consumers reaction to a specific situation. Finally, the last question focuses on the information and knowledge that consumers have on the topic of sustainable products in the home care industry, as this aspect is also part of the Feelings and Cognition driver in the SHIFT model. If it is clear what information the consumers are looking for when purchasing sustainable products and what knowledge encourages them to purchase, marketeers can assess what information to expose the consumers to in order to shift their behaviour.

The closing part of the interview is a follow up on how their perception of sustainability changed by this interview and from raising the topic and discussing it. This part also includes a discussion if they are more likely to purchase sustainable goods now opposing to before the interview.

The data collection of this thesis was conducted online, through semi-structured interviews using video calls with the subjects. In total 6 semi-structured interviews were organized with consumers living in Denmark. The data collection of the primary research took place during September and October of 2020. All interviews were recorded and then transcribed, and all participants gave consent to be recorded, although every interview was recorded and transcribed anonymously (see Appendix 2).

Since this research focuses on exploring how to shift consumer behaviour towards sustainability in the home hygiene industry, a screening process was used when choosing our participants. This was done to make sure that every participant has some kind of knowledge over sustainable cleaning products and have purchased them before. We conducted the interviews with 3 male and 3 female participants, all aged between 20 and 40. Three of the subjects are living alone in a household, one of them with a partner, and two with a partner and their children. In terms of education, half of the participants have bachelor degree as

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highest education, the other half has master degree. These criteria were set in order to make sure that no gender is under or over represented, and with the chosen age and educational background it can be assumed that all participants were – to a certain degree – exposed information about the importance of sustainability and have some sort of understanding of the topic. Moreover, we were aiming to interview individuals who are already engaged in some kind of sustainable consumer behaviour, including the purchase of sustainable cleaning products, so we can investigate what drives them towards this behaviour and what blocks them from being even more engaged. All participants have different levels of engagement when it comes to sustainability.

The interviews on average lasted between 45 minutes and 1,5 hours, depending on how engaged the consumer is, how many barriers they experience when purchasing sustainable home cleaning products, and how important they perceive the topic. All interviews followed the interview guide that was created beforehand, and all interviews were conducted in English, since the educational level of the participants allowed us to do this without language difficulties. Since during our research, COVID-19 safety regulations and precautions had to be taken into consideration, our decision was to conduct the interviews online in order to minimize the risk of infection, and to make sure that our participants felt safe during their contribution to our research. In the beginning of the interviews, the participants were familiarised with the topic of sustainability in the home care industry in order to avoid any misunderstanding that could potentially lead to errors in the data. During the research, some cases the participants were shown different products or images as part of the interview. In order to ensure the anonymity of the participants, we will be referring to the participants of this study without names. The interviewees will be addressed as Participant 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and Participant 6.