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Ethical products are worth more
Coolfer has an interesting blog entry about applying the lessons from a Wall Street Journal article, which showed that people are willing to pay more for ethical products.
Meanwhile, as the numbers show, the unethical group was demanding to pay significantly less for the product than the control group. In fact, the unethical group punished the coffee company's bad behavior more than the ethical group rewarded its good behavior. The unethical group's mean price was $2.42 below the control group's, while the ethical group's mean price was $1.40 above. So, negative information had almost twice the impact of positive information on the participants' willingness to pay.
In the music industry, the "negative information" is all the RIAA lawsuits, DRM, and all-around bad publicity.
Posted by John Buckman on May 14, 2008 at 11:11 PM | Permalink
Comments
I'm not surprised. I've noticed quite a lot of people who've started to make a statement out of not buying CD's anymore. A few years ago it felt like downloading was popular mostly due to it being so freakishly smooth and simple, you literally had the collected culture of the world at your fingertips and a simple search was enough to get you what you wanted. Lately I feel the reasons have shifted more towards "those companies can shove it, they're not getting a dime from me ever again", especially among the younger generations who grew up downloading culture. It's going to take a long time to get rid of all that bad-will, if ever... so it's good to see that Magnatune is still alive and kicking, wishing you all the best in the future!
PS. That lifetime download membership looks mighty tempting!
Posted by: Olli at May 29, 2008 2:26:43 PM
