Use of Neuromarketing to Explore Sustainable Fashion Consumption in Mauritius

This exploratory study elucidates neuromarketing and sustainable fashion consumption in the context of Mauritius. In the face of climate change, Mauritius being a Small Island Developing State, has to encourage people to develop sustainable livelihoods. Product developers and marketers face the dichotomy between customers’ keenness in sustainable fashion in pre-purchase stages and actual purchase behaviours. Traditional techniques of researching about consumers are not able to totally bridge this gap. Such challenges led to the emergence of neuromarketing, the science of exploring the consumer’s neuroscience. While focusing on this industry’s stakeholders, the objectives were: (1) to recognise their meanings of sustainable fashion consumption, and (2) to know if they understand neuromarketing and its usage to enhance the development of sustainable fashion products. By using an interpretivist approach and a qualitative method, the purposive sampling strategy was used to do in-depth interviews with 15 stakeholders. Consideration was given to, trustworthiness and ethics. The NVIVO software was utilised to analyse the data transcripts and to generate insightful nodes, also known as themes. Hence, a thematic analysis was considered. Prominent nodes produced under sustainable fashion consumption were ‘eco-friendliness’ and ‘understanding the value chain’. The majority of the respondents had an understanding of neuromarketing while common themes emerging from the combination of neuromarketing with sustainable fashion development were ‘motivation for eco-friendliness’ and ‘better discovery of needs and wants of customers’. Word clouds and text query analysis are some of the other types of analysis that were further conducted to reveal insightful recommendations. The latter pertained mainly to: sensitisation and leveraging the pros and cons of neuromarketing; and directing customers to opt for sustainable fashion for the benefit of all. More research is needed about these arenas as sustainable fashion consumption is one which resonates more and more with the day-to-day living of people.