The problem
The Fashion transparency movement has been established in order to
pressure clothing companies to publish information about where their clothes
are made to help enact change in the industry. A lack of transparency makes it
difficult for consumers to tap into the supply chain, thus companies can make
great profit by using cheap and environmentally-unfriendly raw materials as
well as exploiting garment workers. Although various fashion revolution
campaigns have been promoted online, many people still do not recognise the
importance of the issue and the positive effects of having a transparent
fashion industry on both the environment and on protecting human rights
(Fashion Revolution, 2019).
Why the problem is important
Human rights protection
In 2003, Rana Plaza, a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing
over 1,100 garment workers (Thapa, 2017). Among the ruins people found a
variety of clothing brands and realised that the clothes they buy may be made
in similar unsafe factories. To promote efficiency and cost savings, many
international fashion brands are not manufacturers themselves and do not own
their own factories. Therefore, the fragmented supply chains obscure
accountability, making it difficult for people to control and monitor the
working conditions, salaries, and basic human rights of garment workers
(Fashion Revolution, 2019).
Some garment workers are reported to work 10-12 hours per day, sometimes
going up to 16-18 hours, and working 6-7 days a week (Lewis,
C., Muller, D., & Lewis, M, 2019). Their basic wage is usually among
the lowest in society; in developing countries they can earn as little as 250
dollars a month (Lu, 2017). Moreover, garment workers usually work in unsafe
conditions as they “work with no ventilation, breathing in toxic substances,
inhaling fiber dust or blasted sand in unsafe buildings” (Sustain Your Style,
2019).
Environmental protection
Encouraging the fashion industry to be more transparent makes it easier
for the public to monitor the materials that are used in making clothes, to
know how polluted water is dealt with and so on. Without strong supervision
many environmentally damaging behaviours can occur. For example; dyes that
produce toxic substances could be flushed into waterways, excessive use of
wood-based fabrics like rayon and viscose could be used which contributes to
deforestation, and polyester fabrics can shed plastic microfibers which enter
the water cycle, damaging not only the ecosystem, but also our health
(Schipani, 2019).
Promoting fashion transparency encourages companies to publish their
global supply chains so that consumers can make a more informed and ethical
choice.
The target audience
We chose to target students for our project because we believed that
younger adults could have the biggest impact on shopping with transparent
brands and have a larger incentive to help the environment. According to the
Office for National Statistics UK (2019, January 24) in 2018, people who are
less than 30 years old spent on average £21.30 a week on clothes and footwear. This shows that young consumers are spending a
considerable amount of money on fashion, therefore they
could have a big impact on the Fashion Transparency movement. Research has also
found that people aged 18 to 24 are the most likely age to think that we are
not doing enough to protect the environment (Number Cruncher Politics, 2018).
We therefore chose to target students as we believe they have a strong
incentive to support the cause and could also have a big impact.
The Intervention
Instagram
We created an Instagram account in order to reach a large amount of
young adults about the issue of fashion transparency. According to We Are Social & Hootsuite and DataReportal
(2020, January 30) 30% of people who use instagram are between the ages of 18 and
24, therefore it can have a big impact on our target audience. We hoped to
inform our 33 followers about the issues associated with the fashion industry,
such as the impact on the environment, and to challenge consumers behaviours
when it comes to shopping. We named our page ‘conscious.consumer_’ in order to
encourage people to feel a sense of responsibility for the issue and to
actively change their behaviours to help it. 
Poster
We made a poster in order to attract attention and to show some of the
main reasons why we believe that fashion transparency is an important issue. We
decided to use the title ‘Who made my clothes?’ in order to make people think
about the issue on a more personal level and to consider it as an issue that
directly impacts them. We also wanted to highlight ‘Be a Conscious Consumer’ in
order to address the point that we have the power to change the situation and
that everyone needs to take responsibility. The poster concluded by encouraging
people to take responsibility by signing our pledge and shopping with
transparent brands.
The Pledge
We asked people to sign a pledge from the ‘Human Rights Watch’ website
which is send to companies to urge them to publish information about the
factories that make their clothes, with a focus on preventing human rights
violations. We did this by approaching students in Warwick University’s Student
Union, one of the busiest places on Campus, on two separate occasions. We
firstly showed students our poster and briefly explained to them the movement,
why it is important and answered any questions they had. We then asked them to
sign the pledge which we presented to them on our phones. We asked a total of
86 people (67 of which were strangers) to sign our pledge and a total of 83 of
them did. We finally asked them if they could provide us with their email
address so that we could send them a short questionnaire in the following week
about if our intervention had changed their behaviour.
We then sent our questionnaire out to the people who agreed to give us
their email addresses approximately a week after they had signed the pledge. We
got 13 responses. We found from this that 5 people had never heard of the
fashion transparency issue before, 4 people had heard of it but did not know
much about it, and 4 people had heard about the issue before. We then asked how
much people had thought about the issue since signing the pledge, and found
that 7.7% of people had thought about it a lot, 53.8% of people had thought
about it a little and 38.5% had not thought about it much. Crucially, when
asked if they would consider choosing more transparent brands when shopping,
38.5% said that they would and 61.5% said that they would, but not every time
that they shopped. We take this as evidence that our project managed to make
people think about the issue and will have an impact on their behaviour when
choosing brands to shop with, especially considering that the majority of
people had not heard of the transparency issue before.
Psychological and Persuasion Techniques
Mere Exposure Effect
In creating our Instagram page, we wanted to engage our followers with
the issue of being more aware of where they buy clothes from in the industry.
We posted regularly on the page so that people would often see images related
to conscious consumerism appear on their Instagram feed. In doing this, we used
the mere exposure effect as a way for people to gain interest in our issue.
Mere exposure suggests that repeated, unreinforced exposure is enough to
enhance an attitude towards a stimulus (Bornstein et al., 1992). By exposing
people to a lot of stimuli relating to buying ethically sourced clothing, they
would consider this more favourable than how they did previously because they
have increased familiarity with the idea of brands being more transparent. As suggested
by Zajonc (1968), people are likely to rate stimuli more positively and have an
enhanced liking if they see it more often compared to other stimuli. If people
are unaware of the true source of a stimulus, which enhances perceptual
fluency, they may misattribute this for having a greater liking to source
ethically rather than simply being exposed to it previously on our Instagram
page (Fang et al., 2007). We hoped that by exposing our followers to the issue
repeatedly and for an extended period of time, they would have greater interest
in taking action to be a more ‘conscious consumer’ because they have greater
familiarity with the topic. Monahan, Murphy and Zajonc (2000) found that when
participants were exposed to one stimuli more frequently, they rated it much
more positively than the novel stimuli that was presented. This suggests that
higher exposure to a stimuli causes a greater positive association.
Foot-in-the-door Technique
As part of the foot-in-the-door technique, we asked individuals to sign
a pledge on the 'Human Rights Watch' website to petition to large high street
brands to provide information about their supply chain. In doing this, we
obtained initial compliance from people to show they supported our campaign for
fashion transparency. We then used their compliance to facilitate a larger
request by asking if they would also provide their email address to answer a
questionnaire in a week regarding their awareness of the issue and general
shopping habits. Other studies found this technique effective as they had
significantly increased compliance in the final request following multiple
prior requests. Arbuthnot et al. (1976) found over 80% of
participants reported increased recycling behaviours after complying with all
three requests asked of them. We assumed that people, particularly students,
already had existing positive attitudes surrounding fashion transparency so it
would be effective to employ this technique (Scott, 1977). In asking them to
show initial support for the cause, we were able to take advantage of their
self-perception at that time as somebody who is willing to ‘take action’ in
supporting conscious consumerism (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). This meant that
when we asked them to also fill in the questionnaire, they would cooperate to
be part of the cause.
MINDSPACE
Finally, we used some of the techniques from the MINDSPACE framework by
Dolan et al., (2012) in order to enact change in the students.
Salience
The idea of salience is that our behaviour is guided by where our
attention is drawn to (Kahneman & Thaler, 2006). In line with this
approach, we created a poster that was perceptually salient in order to catch
students attention, highlighting the phrase “Be a Conscious Consumer”. This was
to allow students to have a clear idea of what they needed to do in order to
help the issue. We also created a poster that was personally relevant to them
by being titled “Who made my clothes?” to make people think about their impact
on the issue. This was based on a study by Borgida and Howard-Pitney (1983)
which found that people processed messages more if they were more personally
involved, and research by Gigerenzer and Hoffrage (1995) who found that
information relating to personal experiences was easier to encode. We have also
stated previously that young adults feel that environmental action is not going far
enough (Number Cruncher Politics, 2018), therefore we feel that this issue will
feel particularly personally relevant to students.
Ego
We also used the approach of ‘Ego’ as described in MINDSPACE, in order
to make people perform in line with their own positive self image. This is
based on research from Landry et al., (2006) which found that men were more
likely to give more to charity if they were approached by an attractive female,
suggesting that one of the motivations for prosocial behaviour, is trying to
maintain a positive image. Therefore, by informing people of the issues of
fashion transparency and giving them the option to help by giving up a minute
of their time, they would try and maintain their positive self image by proving
that they are willing to take action against these issues.
The future of the project
Upon reflection, a thing that we would change if we did this project
again is the way we approached getting people to shop transparently. We would
provide a list of the fashion companies which are more or less transparent
according to the Fashion Transparency Index 2019 (Fashion Revolution, 2019). In our project, we provided
a link to the index and encouraged students to actively search for which brands
were more or less transparent. However, this requires an active effort for the
consumer and therefore it may have had a bigger impact if we were to provide a
list of the current brands that are transparent on the poster and Instagram
page.
Finally, in order to expand our project in the future, we would
encourage people to target brands and the government to make transparency a
requirement. Whilst we have power as the consumer to demand change, we need
brands and the government to acknowledge the issue as serious in order to make
change. This can be done by pressuring governments and companies through social
media and emailing.
By Amy Clay, Yuyuan Wang and Amelie Trickett
By Amy Clay, Yuyuan Wang and Amelie Trickett
References
Arbuthnot, J, et al. (1976) "The induction of
sustained recycling behavior through the foot-in-the-door technique." Journal
of Environmental Systems 6.4.
Borgida, E., & Howard-Pitney, B. (1983).
Personal involvement and the robustness of perceptual salience effects. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 560.
Bornstein, R. F., & D'agostino, P. R. (1992).
Stimulus recognition and the mere exposure effect. Journal of personality
and social psychology, 63(4), 545.
Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D.,
Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way.
Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277.
Fang, X., Singh, S., & Ahluwalia, R. (2007). An
examination of different explanations for the mere exposure effect. Journal
of consumer research, 34(1), 97-103.
Fashion Revolution. (2019). Fashion transparency index Brazil (2019 edition). Retrieved from https://www.fashionrevolution.org
Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966).
Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of
personality and social psychology, 4(2), 195.
Gigerenzer, G., & Hoffrage, U. (1995). How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: Frequency formats. Psychological Review, 102, 684–704.
Kahneman, D., & Thaler, R. (2006). Anomalies:
Utility maximisation and experienced utility. Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 20, 221–234.
Landry, C., Lange, A., List, J., Price, M., &
Rupp, N. (2006). Toward an understanding of the economics of charity: Evidence
from a field experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121, 747–782.
Lewis, C., Muller, D., & Lewis, M. (2019).
Tailored wages UK 2019. Retrieved from https://labourbehindthelabel.org/
Lu, S. (2017). FASH455 Global apparel & textile
trade and sourcing. Retrieved from
Monahan, J. L., Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B.
(2000). Subliminal mere exposure: Specific, general, and diffuse effects. Psychological
Science, 11(6), 462-466.
Number Cruncher Politics. (May 30, 2018). How do you feel about measures to protect the environment? [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved March 02, 2020, from http://www.statista.com/statistics/895361/environmental-protection-measure-opinions-by-age-united-kingdon-uk/
Office for National Statistics (UK). (January 24, 2019). Average weekly
household expenditure on clothing and footwear in the United Kingdom (UK) in
2018, by age of household reference person* (in GBP) [Graph]. In Statista.
Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/285586/clothing-and-footwear-weekly-uk-household-expenditure-by-age/
Scott, C. A. (1977). Modifying socially-conscious
behavior: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Consumer Research, 4(3),
156-164.
Schipani, S. (2019). The impact of textiles and the clothing industry on
the environment. Retrieved from https://hellohomestead.com/the-impact-of-textiles-and-clothing-industry-on-the-environment/
Sustain Your Style. (2019). Inhumane working
conditions. Retrieved from https://www.sustainyourstyle.org/old-working-conditions
Thapa, T. (2017). Remember Rana Plaza. [online] Human
Rights Watch. Retrieved March 02, 2020 from https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/04/24/remember-rana-plaza
We Are Social & Hootsuite, & DataReportal.
(January 30, 2020). Distribution of Instagram users worldwide as of January
2020, by age group [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved March 01, 2020, from http://www.statista.com/statistics/325587/instagram-global-age-group/
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere
exposure. Journal of personality and social psychology, 9(2p2),
1.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.