: General Electric's Research Approach and Findings

Accepted in California Management Review. Soon available in JSTORInternational audienceIn 2010, General Electric launched an investigation into how multi-national corporations (MNCs) were adapting to rural emerging markets. A team of 33 executives and three academics examined models ranging from Toyota's vehicle servicing program in East Africa to Nokia's localized mobile handset financing in India to Egis Pharmaceuticals' worker retention incentives in Eastern Europe. The project included 15 case studies from India, China, Africa and Eastern Europe. This article presents common tactics that these MNCs have used to successfully adapt to rural markets in emerging regions across five key organizational functions: product development, distribution, service, financing, and human resources

The Role of Centrality of Green Attributes in Green Product Evaluation

International audienceConcern about the limited natural resources of the planet and an interest in careful stewardship of those resources continue to influence the decisions of both firms and consumers. Firms are building environmentally friendly supply chains, including recycled material in their products, and developing manufacturing methods that avoid polluting their surrounding environments. Consumers' reactions to firms' investments have been mixed. While some consumers espouse enthusiasm for more environmentally-friendly offerings, a recent Gallup poll suggests that many stop short of actually purchasing such products (Dunlap 2010). Customers have been found to suffer from "green fatigue" (Platt and Retallack 2009), to be suspicious of "green washing" (www.greenwashingindex.com), and to be unwilling to pay extra for environmentally-conscious products (Bhattacharya and Sen 2004). However, a more fundamental question underlies these reactions: What makes a consumer perceive a product as green or not green to start with? Before a product's environmental friendliness can have any influence on a consumer's purchase decision, the consumer must see the product as green - or not. Consider a consumer looking at two brands of paper towels in a supermarket. The information provided indicates that the environmental savings achieved by including recycled material in both brands is exactly the same, but one brand includes recycled materials in the packaging of the towels, while one includes recycled materials in the towels themselves. Do consumers perceive these two products as equally green? Or consider two laptop computers, one with an environmentally friendly motherboard and the other with an environmental friendly power cord. The use of recycled materials in the two products saves the same amount of plastic material from entering landfills, but do consumers perceive a green peripheral element (the power cord) as contributing as much "greenness" to a product as a green component that is more essential to the product (the motherboard)? In this research, we look at factors that influence a consumer's perception of the environmental friendliness or greenness of a product. We explore this from the perspective of centrality theory (Sloman, Love, and Ahn 1998) which states that certain features of a product are more central - more essential, more integral - to defining what a product (or natural object) is and to what category it belongs. One facet of centrality involves high- versus low-level construals (Trope, Liberman and Wakslak 2007) and so we examine the role construal plays in the consumer's evaluation process and the consumer's categorization of a product as green or not green. We also look at how different elements of a product are presented to the consumer (holistically or separately) and also examine where in the supply chain the "greenness" of a product occurs. We test the effect of these variables across multiple experiments that span four different product categories - mattresses, paper towels, laptop computers, and washing machines. The results of our four studies suggest that products with identical reductions in their environmental impact may have their environmental friendliness evaluated very differently by consumers depending on the centrality or non-centrality of the product features that are green. We find that differences in green perceptions between products with central or peripheral green attributes are attenuated when a high-level or distant construal is triggered. The implications of this for public policy makers and firms are potentially significant. From a public policy perspective, our results suggest that consumers' evaluation process of green claims may be influenced by factors which are not related to green outcomes. In our study, the green claims were very specific and clearly identical, yet the "peripheralness" or centrality of the green feature had a significant effect on the consumers' assessment of greenness. This suggests that consumers' ability to assess environmental impact is influenced by factors not related to environment outcomes. From the perspective of firms, they may wish to consider carefully their green investments and their communication of these efforts. If the same environmental impact can be achieved through both a central feature and a non-central feature, our findings suggest that for positive consumer evaluations, the investment is best made in the central feature. If that is not possible, then encouraging a more abstract construal may alter the consumer's processing and achieve positive results from an investment in a peripheral feature

Beyond Green Regulations: Achieving True Sustainability through Engagement in a Forced Adoption Context

The article discusses a study which looked at the key elements related to sustainability, behavior and forced adoption of technology. These elements include the consumers' engagement ranging from desired behavior change on the positive side to active disengagement due to psychological reactance on the negative side, and the role of marketing in encouraging engagement when adoption is forced. The study enrolled a total of 50 participants between September and November 201

What makes it green? The role of centrality of green attributes in evaluations of the greenness of products

An increasing body of research addresses consumers' green product purchasing behavior, and yet little work has examined how consumers form perceptions of the greenness of products in the first place. Drawing on theories of attribute centrality (the degree to which an attribute is integral in defining an object), the authors argue that products with identical environmental benefits will be judged more or less green depending on whether the benefit stems from a central versus a peripheral attribute. They present four studies that support the hypotheses and explore factors that influence the effect of central attributes, including product category membership and integration of the green attribute with other elements of the product. They include controls for firm motivations and importance of the attribute to the individual consumer. The authors conclude the article with managerial and public policy implications, such as advice for firms on where to make green investments for maximum consumer impact and insight for public policy makers on the need for consumer assistance in objectively evaluating products with identical environmental benefits that achieve those benefits in different ways

Predicting the effects of alternative pricing strategies in an artificial society undergoing technology adoption

Artificial societies are computer models in which the collective behavior of a population of simulated human decision makers is observed over time. Here we describe an artificial society of “soft computing agents” (model consumers) making probabilistic purchasing decisions about new technological products that are introduced by competing firms. The model is studied under varying conditions to determine the relative success of these firms as they pursue different pricing strategies designed to increase their market share. We find that a critical factor in determining the success of different pricing strategies is the utility that an individual consumer gains from other consumers adopting the same technology. Further, financial success is uncoupled from market share under some conditions, so (for example) while an inferior technology may gain substantial market share by aggressive price-cutting, it is unlikely to gain financial rewards. These results add to growing evidence that artificial society models may prove useful in improving our understanding of collective decision making in complex sociological, economic and business management situation