Determinants of Willingness to Pay for Sustainable Fashion: An Empirical Study of Italian Consumers

Abstract

The pressure in the fashion industry is growing stronger to address its environmental and social effects and transition to sustainable alternatives. Nevertheless, there is a persistent disconnect between the reported environmentally conscious attitude of consumers and their actual buying behavior, and particularly willingness to buy at a high price. This paper explores the predictors behind willingness/to-pay (WTP) of sustainable fashion characteristics: bio-based clothing, recycled clothing, second-hand clothing, and fair working conditions, in the culturally important Italian market. The study employs descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, factor analysis, and cluster analysis to analyze secondary survey data of 401 Italian consumers, focusing on the study design of a quantitative, cross-sectional research design. The results indicate a complicated terrain where geographic and economic variables outshine economic factors than the demographic and general attitudinal variables. The most promising positive correlate of all sustainable attributes, especially bio-based clothing, is income. It is worth noting that the Southern Italy and the Islands are characterized by regional differences that imply that the mean WTP of consumers in the South is higher than in the North. On the other hand, general environmental concern and pro-environmental behavior have no significant impact on WTP of recycled clothing indicating a strong attitude behavior gap. There is no evidence of the hypothesized age, gender, or education effects on WTP. Multivariate models (regression and SEM) do not fit sufficiently which indicates that the relationships are non-linear and too complicated to use the traditional linear processes. The K-means cluster analysis will be used to distinguish two group segments of heterogeneous consumer profiles, such as high-WTP/low-concern and low-WTP/high-concern market segments. This study concludes that in Italy, financial capacity and sub-national cultural circumstances are the main drivers of sustainable fashion valuation, and general environmental attitudes are weak direct drivers. Theoretical implications imply that consumption models cannot be based too much on demographic and general attitudinal variables but, on the contrary, it is context dependent. Practical implications give a marketer a blueprint of segmentation-based communications and give recommendations to regional pricing and product development strategies. In terms of economic obstacles and local cultural peculiarities, the policymakers need to take into account financial incentives and infrastructural investments. The paper provides richer, empirically based information about the Italian sustainable fashion consumer, beyond the simplistic demographical definitions of the consumer to the intricate nature of the interactions among economics and geography and consumer motivations.