Can Digital Technology Change Consumer Behavior?

We select purchasing green products as a form of consumer behavior.

Through our research, we found that there are digital technologies, in the market, available to stimulate and bring sustainable consumer behavior;

we are pretty interested in the form of purchasing wheat fiber lunch box in China. This green product is our targeted product, which belongs to the behavioral domain of catering equipment. Many factors influence customers buying green products. First, compared with plastics, people who experienced environmental education can recognize the advantages of wheat fiber. They would like to purchase the degradable products in order to protect the environment. Second, price sensitive consumers pay attention to the cost performance. In general, according to the data collected from Tmall, the average price of wheat fiber lunch box is 25 RMB whereas plastic lunch box is 35 RMB in China.Last but not the least, consuming plastic products pose threats on human’s health, which we will talk about it later. All of three factors are related to consumer awareness. The implications of buying green products can firstly save money.The green products have relatively cheap price through our market investigation and they can last for a long time.since they are made from recycled materials that tend to be more durable and better quality. Secondly, green products provide healthier lifestyle. Plastic products contain harmful chemicals that put us at the risk of developing illnesses and diseases.Green products take away all these risks by consuming natural products and avoiding additives  we are unaware of. It also raises concerns on the sustainability aspects. The lifetime of plastics is estimated to be in the range of centuries. As we currently have no way to get rid of them, microplastics will continue to persist and accumulate in soil and water. Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis. by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption. Moreover, the water resource is being damaged by the plastics products as well. Recently, Wang wenfeng，Doctor of pollution ecology in The Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that through research of the main form microplastics in the water environment of Hong lake and Dongting lake, they found that plastic fibers accounted for more than 60%,. Furthermore, colored microplastics account for more than 70 percent. AR(Augmented reality is the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real time. which we believe it can be applied to raise consumers’ awareness and to achieve the behavior change objectives through persuading people to buy green products instead of purchasing plastic products. Thirty percent of American respondents said the ability to visualize a product or experience in VR or AR would make them impulsively to buy. This number jumps to 53 percent for those aged 25-34. AR can create psychological incentive to persuade customer’s In terms of digital technology intervention’ to be used by a particular organization, Yimante.Co.Lte sells a large amount of wheat fiber products on the market,especially on the Taobao online platform.AR can be a useful tool when the company take it tailoring into their products selling aspect. Based on the current technology level,we reckon that Yimante can add the Brand-AR scanning logo with words ‘scan me’ to the wheat fiber lunch box ,People can use the Alipay scanning system to identify the products through mobile camera and then watch the following vivid green-consuming video. The content of the video will include two parts. The first part is the procession of decomposing the wheat fiber lunch box. As a result, the wheat fiber lunch box will not damage the land resources as plastic lunch box do. The other one is that people frequently use plastic daily necessities can easily bring the plastic components into consumer’s body; these components cannot be identified and they may have bad effects to people’s body. There are several reasons to support why we chose AR as our intervention design. (已有）Firstly, AR could be acted as an educator for those who already experienced green-consuming education know the merits of environmental-friendly material, this is an opportunity to deepen their impressions. On the other hand, this is also a chance for people who never experienced green-consuming education to learn the importance of these materials to the environment. Secondly, based on the Chinese taxation policy, manufactures can save half of the money in terms of the taxation payment through producing green products. According to the research, the cost of pp(Propene Polymer) is 17000RMB per ton, while the cost of wheat fiber is 10500 RMB per ton. Therefore, the cost of producing wheat fiber box is much lower than producing plastic box. Thirdly, the example showed in the mobile screen helping people to understand the potential health risks using plastic products thereby activating their health consciousness and persuading them to purchase green products.pro-environment behavior through animation provided by AR, imagining a positive consequence of possible event raises customer’s belief that this consequence will happen, and imagining our own future behavior increases the chances of enacting this behavior.By playing the AR animation, the benefits of purchasing wheat fiber lunch box bring users to imagine positively, which leads them to purchase later. Based on the ‘Social Identity’concept, which has two dimensions, ‘Cognitive social identity concept’ and ‘Emotional social identity concept’ .(字幕特效) By implementing visual-animation function in mobile screen, people who finally choose green products might think that they are the contributors towards the sustainable development in China and tends to classify themselves into environmentalist group. Then, they will obtain a sense of belongings and might be proud of being part of this community.Also, construal level theory, describes the relation between psychological distance and people’s thoughts and it has two dimensions abstract and concrete. Before people use their mobile-app to scan the logo on the lunch box, most of them might know the benefits of using green products, but their determinations for choosing wheat fiber lunch box might be hesitated since they usually purchased plastic products before. (The majority of lunch boxes existed in the market previously are made of plastic要读出来Then, as they see the animation playing on their mobile screen, it gives them a direct feeling of purchasing green products is a good choice. Thinking about, the image of land being protected is popping on customers’ heads through green consumption. In this case, the relation moves from abstract to concrete Scholars have noted that external imagery is key in determining how individuals perceive real-world issues and can transform abstract issues into something that can be visualized – and that individuals can respond to. Hence, when people make purchasing decision, AR could be regarded as a persuader to motivate people to buy green products.

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