Visual Data-Driven Profiling of Green Consumers

There is an increasing interest in green consumer behavior. These consumers are ecologically conscious and interested in buying environmentally friendly products. Earlier efforts at identifying these consumers have relied upon questionnaires based on demographic and psychographic data. Most of the studies have concluded that it is not possible to identify a unanimous profile for a green consumer, because: (1) there might be several profiles for green consumers, and (2) in questionnaires, consumers tend to answer according to their intentions, not according to actual behavior. We apply a new method, the Weighted Self-Organizing Map (WSOM) for visual customer segmentation in order to profile green consumers. The consumers are identified through a data-driven analysis based on actual transaction data, including both demographic and behavioral information. The WSOM accounts for the 'degree' of how green a consumer is by giving a larger weight to consumers who buy more green products. The identified profiles are verified by comparison to earlier research.

[1]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Self-Organizing Maps, Third Edition , 2001, Springer Series in Information Sciences.

[2]  G. Thompson,et al.  Explaining the Choice of Organic Produce: Cosmetic Defects, Prices, and Consumer Preferences , 1998 .

[3]  S. Padel,et al.  Exploring the gap between attitudes and behaviour: understanding why consumers buy or do not buy organic food , 2005 .

[4]  My Bui,et al.  ENVIRONMENTAL MARKETING: A MODEL OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOR , 2005 .

[5]  Haim Levkowitz,et al.  From Visual Data Exploration to Visual Data Mining: A Survey , 2003, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[6]  Esa Alhoniemi,et al.  Clustering of the self-organizing map , 2000, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst..

[7]  M. Laroche,et al.  Targeting consumers who are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products , 2001 .

[8]  Cynthia A. Brewer,et al.  ColorBrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps , 2003 .

[9]  R. Dunlap,et al.  The Social Bases of Environmental Concern: A Review of Hypotheses, Explanations and Empirical Evidence , 1980 .

[10]  Stavros P. Kalafatis,et al.  Green marketing and Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour: a cross‐market examination , 1999 .

[11]  James A. Roberts.  Green consumers in the 1990s: Profile and implications for advertising , 1996 .

[12]  Corliss L. Green,et al.  Racial Differences in Consumer Environmental Concern , 1997 .

[13]  Barbro Back,et al.  Combining Unsupervised and Supervised Data Mining Techniques for Conducting Customer Portfolio Analysis , 2010, ICDM.

[14]  Athanasios Krystallis,et al.  Purchasing motives and profile of the Greek organic consumer: a countrywide survey , 2002 .

[15]  James A. Roberts,et al.  Exploring the Subtle Relationships between Environmental Concern and Ecologically Conscious Consumer Behavior , 1997 .

[16]  C. Cochrane,et al.  Who buys organic food? A profile of the purchasers of organic food in Northern Ireland , 1995 .

[17]  Barbro Back,et al.  Customer portfolio analysis using the SOM , 2011, Int. J. Bus. Inf. Syst..

[18]  James A. Roberts,et al.  Environmental segmentation alternatives: a look at green consumer behavior in the new , 1999 .

[19]  D. Jolly,et al.  Differences Between Buyers and Nonbuyers of Organic Produce and Willingness to Pay Organic Price Premiums , 1991 .

[20]  John B. Unipan,et al.  Green Buying: The Influence of Environmental Concern on Consumer Behavior , 1997 .

[21]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Things you haven't heard about the self-organizing map , 1993, IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks.

[22]  Pawan Lingras,et al.  Temporal analysis of clusters of supermarket customers: conventional versus interval set approach , 2005, Inf. Sci..

[23]  Helene Hill,et al.  Organic milk: attitudes and consumption patterns , 2002 .

[24]  Juha Vesanto,et al.  SOM-based data visualization methods , 1999, Intell. Data Anal..

[25]  Peter Sarlin,et al.  Data and dimension reduction for visual financial performance analysis , 2015, Inf. Vis..

[26]  Gaetano Chinnici,et al.  A multivariate statistical analysis on the consumers of organic products , 2002 .

[27]  Mário Raposo,et al.  Green Consumer Market Segmentation: Empirical Findings from Portugal , 2010 .

[28]  Diane M. Samdahl,et al.  Social Determinants of Environmental Concern , 1989 .

[29]  Rudolf R. Sinkovics,et al.  Can socio-demographics still play a role in profiling green consumers? A review of the evidence and an empirical investigation , 2003 .

[30]  Saroj Kumar Datta,et al.  Pro-environmental Concern Influencing Green Buying: A Study on Indian Consumers , 2011 .

[31]  P. Stern,et al.  The New Ecological Paradigm in Social-Psychological Context , 1995 .

[32]  David Jobber,et al.  Environmentally responsible purchase behaviour: a test of a consumer model , 2000 .

[33]  Jack Arbuthnot,et al.  The Roles of Attitudinal and Personality Variables in the Prediction of Environmental Behavior and Knowledge , 1977 .

[34]  J. H. Ward.  Hierarchical Grouping to Optimize an Objective Function , 1963 .

[35]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Self-organized formation of topologically correct feature maps , 2004, Biological Cybernetics.

[36]  Marie Cottrell,et al.  Advantages and drawbacks of the Batch Kohonen algorithm , 2002, ESANN.

[37]  Jong Beom Ra,et al.  Edge preserving vector quantization using self-organizing map based on adaptive learning , 1993, Proceedings of 1993 International Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-93-Nagoya, Japan).

[38]  L. Åberg,et al.  Attitudes towards organic foods among Swedish consumers. , 2001 .

[39]  Russell H. Weigel.  Ideological and Demographic Correlates of Proecology Behavior , 1977 .

[40]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  A Visual Framework for Knowledge Discovery on the Web: An Empirical Study of Business Intelligence Exploration , 2005, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[41]  Esa Alhoniemi,et al.  Self-organizing map in Matlab: the SOM Toolbox , 1999 .

[42]  Peter Sarlin.  A Weighted SOM for Classifying Data with Instance-Varying Importance , 2012, ICDM Workshops.

[43]  Bobby Banerjee,et al.  How Green Is My Value: Exploring the Relationship Between Environmentalism and Materialism , 1994 .

[44]  Olivia Parr Rud,et al.  Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy , 2009 .

[45]  The Ecological Product Buying Motive: A Challenge For Consumer Education , 1975 .

[46]  A. Tynan,et al.  Market Segmentation , 2018, Entrepreneurial Management Theory and Practice.

[47]  Julia Sophie Woersdorfer,et al.  Consumer support for environmental policies: An application to purchases of green cars , 2009 .

[48]  Barbro Back,et al.  Combining visual customer segmentation and response modeling , 2014, Neural Computing and Applications.

[49]  John M. McCann,et al.  Market Segment Response to the Marketing Decision Variables , 1974 .

[50]  Margareta Wandel,et al.  Environmental concern in consumer evaluation of food quality , 1997 .

[51]  M. Wedel,et al.  Market Segmentation: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations , 1997 .

[52]  Jari Kangas.  Sample weighting when training self-organizing maps for image compression , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE Workshop on Neural Networks for Signal Processing.

[53]  Robert J. Lavidge,et al.  The Socially Conscious Consumer , 1972 .

[54]  Fern K. Willits,et al.  Environmental Attitudes and Behavior , 1994 .

[55]  Sang-Chul Lee,et al.  A cross-national market segmentation of online game industry using SOM , 2004, Expert Syst. Appl..

[56]  Haiyan Li.  DATA VISUALIZATION OF ASYMMETRIC DATA USING SAMMON MAPPING AND APPLICATIONS OF SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS , 2005 .

[57]  E. Tsakiridou,et al.  Attitudes and behaviour towards organic products: an exploratory study , 2008 .

[58]  A. Worsley,et al.  Australians' organic food beliefs, demographics and values , 2005 .

[59]  Paulo J. G. Lisboa,et al.  Segmentation of the on-line shopping market using neural networks , 1999 .

[60]  Seonaidh McDonald,et al.  Sustainable consumption: green consumer behaviour when purchasing products , 2009 .