Consumers' behavior

Sustainable product consumption is increasing (El Bilai 2019) while little is known about which factors drive this trend. Using Twitter data on coffee consumption in Germany, we try to understand how coffee attributes (Bangsa and Schlegelmilch, 2020) consumer attributes, and social norms (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) influences consumers’ perception.

In the context of Twitter analysis (Samoggia, Riedel, and Ruggeri, 2020), the content of tweets is quantified as the level of perception, thus social norms for each user is calculated as the average perception of their peers.

Using the keywords “coffee” and “kaffee”, we found 7,000 original users located within Ger- many whose tweets between 2017 - 2019 were collected, resulted in a corpus of 1,910,000 tweets in English or German. We extended the data collection to 364,000 users that were mentioned by the original user, resulting in an additional 60,104,000 tweets that were published in 2017-2019 in English or German. We then utilized regressions to understand the relationship between sustainable coffee tweets and aforementioned factors.

The results showed that coffee attributes such as origin, cost, consumers’ attributes such as sustainability awareness and social norms on sustainability and social norms on sustain- able coffee consumption are significant factors leading to sustainable coffee mention. This suggested that mainstreaming sustainable coffee consumption requires not only aware- ness of sustainability in general but also a community approach to sustainability and sustainable coffee in particular.

Nguyen, N. 2021. Network as social norms - sustainable coffee on Twitter. Presentation at ECMI conference.