Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility

The general purpose of this article is to measure to what extent consumers are ready to pay for fair trade property when they buy coffee. The author starts with couple definition in order to understand what we call fair-trade. We can consider that it means “buying product from farmers in developping countries on more favorable terms than commercial terms and marketing them in developped coutry”.

Before starting to investigate we need to look into the the context of the market. The market for ethical products is undenibly growing. Indeed according to what an European study show us, 46% of european consumers claim that they are likely to pay more for ethical products. However there is a huge difference between saying it and really doing it.

Of course consumers behavior are changing in a good way, it is obvious, but not as much as what we expect. How can we explain that ethical-labelling initiatives often have less than 1% market shares. This is what we cal the attitude-behavior gap.

In fact, even if the willingness of the consumer is real and sincere, the most important factors affecting the buying-decision process are the price, the quality, the convenience of the product and his brand familiarity. We must pay attention to the questions we ask and take the time to assess the relevance of these questions.

The attitude-behavior gap comes from 2 main issues:

- The intentions measured toward ethical products do not take into account the higher prices of the product.

- There is a lack of availablity of these products and a lack of information.

Before beginning this investigation you should know that many studies have been made about similar subjects.In some cases this can give us an indication for the conduct of our investigation, but sometimes this is inconsistent with our results. In addition,