Purpose - Consumer values increasingly favor sustainable development in
products and services, thereby fostering the need to develop new
operational and managerial practices that support sustainability in
supply chain management. The purpose of this study is to identify
relevant product features related to sustainable development in this
context, and use the choice of mobile phone as an example in measuring
their importance. Design/methodology/approach - The study used two
different methods (qualitative and quantitative) in two phases. First it
organized focus-group discussions in order to identify the features of
sustainability that affect the choice of a mobile phone. The most
significant features served as a starting point for the choice of
attributes to be included in the final step, choice-based conjoint
analysis (CBC), which assesses respondents' value functions by means of
latent class clustering. Between the two major phases it carried out two
additional pre-tests in order to reduce the number of attributes.
Findings - The results provide fundamental information concerning the
relative importance of sustainability features in the selection of a
mobile phone. The study identified four different clusters of
purchasers: updaters, budgeters, environmentalists, and long-life users.
According to the findings, some consumers are willing to pay a premium
for sustainability features. The authors discuss the potential
implications of the results in the context of supply chain design.
Originality/value - The literature on supply chain management tends to
see the consumers as a "black box". This paper reports the first results
of opening this box by linking the supply chain perspective to consumer
choice behavior.