Consumers' conflicting aspirations
Consumer appetite for energy efficiency seems endless. Purchases of appliances with top-rated energy labels have soared throughout Europe since 2013 and continue upwards.
Added to this, increasing numbers of people in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands and Spain place energy efficiency over any other feature as the most important when choosing their final product.
On one hand, they are genuinely placing increasing importance on energy efficiency - and this is increasingly driven by their wider environmental awareness and concern, rather than just a desire to save money on household bills.
‘Preserving the environment’ is one of the top 10 most important guiding principles of life for people in Germany, France and Italy - and in the top 15 for Spain, UK and Sweden - with this increased awareness impacting both their own lives and the way they expect companies to behave.
46% "I feel guilt when I do something that is not environmentally friendly"
60% "Brands and companies have to be environmentally responsible these days" (up from 51% in 2015)
GfK Consumer Life 2020
On the other hand, those same people also want household appliances that offer them a richer experience – i.e. a full range of the latest technical features which go hand in hand with the larger capacity appliances.
Such appliances are attractive to people due to offering versatility (for example) to wash large items such as duvets or cook for large parties (when we’re allowed to do that again).
Naturally, these larger appliances do use more energy than the smaller alternatives.
These conflicting wants, combined with the fact that manufacturers’ marketing has focused primarily on the efficiency rating above other energy information, has led to situations where consumers may have jumped to wrong assumptions, unless they proactively researched all the details.
For example: Someone replacing their old A-rated appliance with an A++ one could easily have assumed, based on that one piece of ‘focus’ information, that they were going reduce their total energy consumption. But, because they bought a higher capacity model with better features, they end up using more energy than they did for their old, lower rated but smaller capacity machine.
These people could have been left feeling disappointed when they realize that the choice they made had not been fully informed. It’s highly likely that they would transfer those feeling of disappointment onto the brand or retailer they had bought from for not being more transparent up-front or educating them on the fuller energy-use picture.
Further complicating this picture is consumers’ lack of perception of a real difference between the old A+, A++ and A+++ ratings. The old labelling offers little impetus in pushing consumers toward the very highest-rating for their choice of appliance.
