from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Product packaging plays an important role not only in managing direct and reverse material flows, but also in managing value for individual customer segments or micro-segments. While the design of secondary and tertiary packaging is more important from a supply chain management perspective, primary packaging is the most important for end consumers. When making purchasing decisions in consumer markets, consumers address various aspects of primary packaging, not only aspects that affect the economic viability of the purchase, but also environmental and social aspects. The perception of this importance is not uniform across the whole consumer population, and usually varies according to the different characteristics of consumer segments. This paper examines the variation in perceived importance of selected sustainable aspects of packaging in relation to consumer chemicals. It presents the results of primary quantitative research among 400 consumers of products such as cleaning agents, laundry detergents and personal care products. Using descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing and two-stage clustering methods, it defines the importance of different aspects of sustainable packaging and the differences in perceptions of this importance in relation to consumers' inclination towards environmental protection. The main conclusion of the paper is that all aspects of sustainable packaging are significantly more important to environmentally inclined consumers, but the ranking of the aspects studied in order of importance is the same for both the mainstream and environmentally inclined consumer segments. Consumers consider it most important that the packaging should provide clear and trustworthy information about the product and be recyclable. For environmentally oriented consumers, however, this is more important.
Keywords: Packaging, sustainable packaging, customer, environmental aspects, consumer chemicals© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.