Ethical Consumers’ Awareness of Vegan Materials: Focused on Fake Fur and Fake Leather

With an increase in ethical awareness, people have begun to criticize the unethical issues associated with the use of animal materials. This study focused on the transition of global consumers’ awareness toward vegan materials and the relationship between the interest in ethical subjects such as animals, the environment, and vegan materials. For this purpose, consumers’ posts about fur/fake fur and leather/fake leather uploaded on Google and Twitter from 2008 to 2019 were utilized, and the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency ( Tf-idf ) value was extracted using Python 3.7. Furthermore, the worldwide Google keyword search volume of each word was analyzed using Smart PLS 3.0 to investigate global consumers’ awareness. First, with time, consumers began relating animal materials such as fur and leather to topics such as animal rights, animal abuse, and animal protection. Second, as interest in “animal welfare” increased, interest in “fake fur” also rose, and as interest in “cruelty free” increased, interest in “fake fur”, “vegan fur”, and “vegan leather” also increased. Third, as consumers’ interest in the “environment” increased, interest in vegan materials such as “fake fur” and “fake leather” decreased. However, as interest in “eco” increased, interest in “vegan leather” also augmented.