Provider strategies and the greening of consumption practices: Exploring the role of companies in sustainable consumption

Abstract

Making consumption practices more sustainable means incorporating new ideas, information and products into existing consumption routines of citizen-consumers. For a successful incorporation process it is crucial that companies, as main providers of new products and services, develop an active orientation on consumers and their practices. We argue that the core elements of a consumer orientation of companies can refer to (i) improvement of the environmental performance of the company (ii) provision of environmental information on both the direct and indirect environmental impacts and (iii) images and narratives on sustainable consumption. In practice, companies show considerable variation with respect to both the contents and the level of their consumer orientation, making it possible to distinguish between different types of company strategies. While recognizing that company-consumer interactions on sustainable consumption have developed most strongly in OECD countries, we argue that our conceptual approach is of immediate relevance to emerging economies due to the globalization of both company strategies and public audiences. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.