Ludovica Cesareo on How Creativity Can Make Products More Sustainable

Photo by iStock/Yagi-Studio

In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, host Stephanie Veto talks with Dr. Ludovica Cesareo about luxury goods and her current research on how creativity and emotional attachment can make products more sustainable.

Dr. Cesareo is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing. She’s an expert in consumer behavior with luxury and counterfeit luxury goods, ethical decision-making, aesthetics and emotions. 

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Below is an edited excerpt from the conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF].

Veto: Your current research touches on a lot of this because you're studying how creativity can equal sustainability. Can you talk about what that means? 

Cesareo: The paper I want to talk to you about today is this paper I'm working on with three of my Italian co-authors. Sustainability has three pillars. There's the recycle component, the repair/reuse component and the reduce component.

The marketing literature has really focused on the recycling dimension, even though we know that its contribution to the protection of the environment is actually pretty limited, especially compared to the other two dimensions of reusing and reducing. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, says that reuse and reduce are the two most successful strategies to protect the environment. 

There was some recent research by Bain & Company back in 2023 that says that 48% of all consumers care about the length of usage and the durability of their products, and they want to minimize waste. There is this collective conscience about sustainability. And then interestingly, all the research that has been done on durability, it's mostly been about physical product characteristics. Meaning the quality of the materials and the processes through which these products were made. 

We're marketers, we study consumer behavior. We were more interested in if there are any intangible product characteristics that can have that same effect? We didn't want to study durability from a physical perspective; we wanted to look at it from a consumer perspective. We wondered, well, can we foster longer product usage if we think about an intangible product characteristic? We focus specifically on creativity. 

Creativity, we think about it a lot, especially in advertising terms, but it's this capability of producing novel, imaginative or useful ideas in the most diverse product domains; whether it's design, furniture, food or art. Interestingly, most of the marketing and consumer behavior literature focus on creativity as an outcome variable, but we study it as an antecedent. 

The main thesis of this paper is, if a product has high creativity, will consumers keep it and use it for longer? And if so, why?  We think that creative products can elicit this stronger emotional attachment because of their novelty. There's two main dimensions of creativity; novelty and appropriateness. Novelty can enhance the distinctiveness of the product and reduce the substitutability, which makes the consumer feel special when they use it. 

Higher creativity makes consumers more likely to use the product for longer because they feel more emotionally attached to it. 

Veto: Can you give a little detail on what a creatively made product could be? 

Cesareo: Creativity in general, but in products specifically in our case, has the two dimensions I was mentioning; novelty and appropriateness. Novelty is the degree to which the product is original, unique and distinctive. Appropriateness is the degree to which the product is functional and useful for the purpose it was created for. 

What's fascinating is that while both dimensions are important when assessing the creativity of a product, consumers mostly think about the novelty. There's been tons of studies, and we confirmed this in a pilot study as well, that if you ask consumers to describe a creative product, they are going to judge it mostly on its novelty because they already expect a minimum threshold of appropriateness. You don't expect a product to not be functional, and to not be adequate for what it was created for. So, the creativity dimension is really judged in terms of its novelty. 

Basically, we showed consumers a highly creative product, described it as such or asked them to recall a product that they think is creative. Every consumer values it differently. But the consistent dimension that we think about is novelty. So how unique, how distinctive and how original the product is. 

Veto: What are your conclusions? 

Cesareo: From a theoretical perspective, the paper contributes to the literature on creativity in studying it as an antecedent of consumer behavior and specifically of sustainable behaviors. If you're extending the length of product usage of a product, you're effectively engaging in a more sustainable behavior. We give some suggestions to managers, especially mass-market companies, to highlight the creativity of their products. Our results show that in the mass market space, that makes consumers more likely to want to keep them longer and use them longer and engage in more sustainable behaviors. 

One interesting pushback that I have to mention that we got in this round of review is if you're a fast fashion company, why would you want consumers to use your product longer? Because, at the end of the day, your goal is to sell as much as you can. It was a very fair comment. And so, we had to acknowledge in the paper that’s true. You could be giving up short-term sales. But there's a lot of evidence, both from an academic perspective and in the industry, that shows that companies that embed sustainability in their business strategy do better. 

In the paper now, in the discussion, we give the examples of Ben and Jerry's or Tom's or Seventh Generation. Then we discuss Patagonia. Patagonia, an outdoor gear company, started as rock climbing gear. Then it became an outdoor sports company. They're a certified B Corporation. They launched this very famous Don't Buy This Jacket campaign and it's one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time. They are incredibly successful. They make over $100 million a year in revenue. They sell a billion dollars in outdoor clothing. So clearly, even though they-- and they have this program called the Worn Wear program, where it promotes customers reusing their clothes and repairing them rather than discarding them. 

What we suggest is that if Patagonia can successfully take the advice of helping your consumers use products longer, clearly that's something that a lot of other companies should think about.