Inclusion of Life Cycle Thinking in a Sustainability-Oriented Consumer’s Typology: A Proposed Methodology and an Assessment Tool

Characterizing consumers in terms of their propensity to practice sustainable consumption represents an interesting research challenge in which a crucial role is played by the questionnaire in terms of its structure and classification criteria. Various classification rules have been proposed in the literature, which can be used to identify consumer types and signify their propensity to practice the principles of sustainable development in daily life. In this paper, we based our approach in designing a classification tool on a combination of two elements: the concept of voluntary simplicity as a pillar for consumer characteristics and the idea of assessing consumers by using filters, in a modified form introducing many new aspects of life-cycle thinking. The tool proposed provides insight into the relationship between the consumer’s typology and behavior during purchasing decisions in daily life. The main function of the proposed tool is to assign respondents to one of the proposed consumer types distinguished and characterized in terms of many aspects of life cycle thinking. A pilot survey has been performed in order to verify the proposed tool, and the survey results have been presented in the paper, as well.