Consumer attitudes toward sustainable packaged beauty products

Abstract

Sustainability as a very significant topic nowadays started to be in greater focus by countries around the world in order to reduce the effect of climate change, and to somehow preserve the planet Earth. As many new sustainable production methods began to emerge, one of them are sustainably packaged beauty products, which have recently become of great importance, especially considering that the majority of the population uses beauty products on a daily basis, some even more than once. Given that consumers are the ones who somehow decide whether to use something and how much, it is very important to examine their attitudes in order to gain insight into the consumer situation related to beauty products packaged in this way. In this regard, the goal of this master's thesis is to examine the attitudes of consumers about sustainably packaged cosmetic products in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as factors that could influence their purchase of them, and to thereby obtain to some extent an overview of how much people are familiar with sustainability in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and how much it is represented there in general. As for the research methodology, qualitative research was chosen in the form of a semi-structured interview with citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who belong to Generation Z and Millennials. Bosnia and Herzegovina was chosen as the country in which the research will be conducted. to be carried out primarily because this topic is very important and it is important to see the views of the citizens of the country in order to establish how much they are interested in it. Likewise, research on this topic has not yet been done in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and thus in some way a new contribution would be made and also a recommendation for future studies. This master’s thesis is based on Consumer Behaviour Theory from which personal factors (lifestyle, age, gender, and income) were taken for analysis to investigate the participants and to reveal their influence on the purchase of sustainably packaged cosmetic products and also it is based on a part of the Cue Utilization Theory from which aspects of price and packaging cues were taken in order to determine the effect they can have on consumers when purchasing sustainably packaged products. This research provides a new contribution as well as recommendations for the state authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as for the companies dealing with the sale of sustainably packaged cosmetic products.