Emission Compensation as Companies’ Sustainability Strategy: Hindering Genuine Sustainability or Striving Towards It? Individual Consumers’ Perspective.

Sammanfattning: This study was designed to explore how consumers perceive voluntary emission compensation as a companies’ sustainability strategy and how to achieve common action between companies and individual consumers towards sustainability. Emission compensation as companies’ sustainability strategy has appeared to be a complex strategy from the consumers perspective, and there are multiple challenges in order to implement it effectively. The study includes 20 individual consumers which were examined through five different focus groups, with the focus on attitudes towards sustainability and emission compensation. In the study, we combine companies’ communication with signal theory to individual consumers’ consumption behaviour by applying the theory of planned behaviour. The main findings were that in general, individual consumers do not believe that voluntary emission compensation is an effective strategy towards sustainability. Instead, individual consumers indicate regulations as a requirement in order to effectuate emission compensation. Moreover, individual consumers seem to have low trust in companies’ sustainability communication in general because the information on emission compensation was specifically lacking. This study adds in-depth analysis of consumers perceptions of compensated everyday life products, such as food, to the existing body of research which has mainly focused explicitly on aviation and air travel industries. Moreover, these studies have been quantitative in nature and our study reveals the deeper foundations why consumers think as they do.