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The study of consumer behaviour is a dynamic and longstanding challenge to continuously understand the factors which influence consumers’ buying behaviour. Though internal (for example attitude, motivation and learning) and external factors (marketing stimuli) are equally important, the focus of this study is on external influences and market trends. Consumer markets around the world have recently seen the increase of ethical products. Those products that are differentiated by their moral or sustainable values and attributes, for example environmentally friendly products or body lotions not tested on animals. The provision of these products is a result of organisations’ realisation that in order to increase their customer base, their values must be centred on doing good for the community as well as the environment and should be visible to consumers. For a number of organisations this means marketing the ethical values and attributes of the products they provide so that consumers will ultimately choose their products. However, in order to understand consumers’ willingness to pay for these products, marketers need to understand the price perceptions consumers have towards these products. The purpose of this study relates to this and aims to determine the influence that the marketing of ethically framed personal care products, as an external influence, has on consumers’ willingness to pay for these products. More specifically, this study aims to determine whether South African females are willing to pay more for ethically framed personal care products than for ordinary personal care products. This will be done by specifically assessing their reference, fair and reservation price perceptions. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2014 / Marketing Management / unrestricted

Starting in 1952 with Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Union (EU) successively enlarged to 27 member states in 2011. Since 2004, 10 Eastern European countries have joined the EU and, at the time of writing, five countries still have official EU candidate status and may join the EU in the near future. The permanent enlargement of the EU has led, and continues to lead, to social, cultural, economic, and linguistic pluralization and heterogenization and, more and more, causes a feeling of alienation among EU citizens. This comes along with a reduced willingness to share power, labor, and money among EU states, provokes tendencies of renationalization, and the resurgence of national thinking and acting. In the European common labor market these tendencies are attended by emerging exclusive nationalistic working climates and therefore undermine the formal freedom of movement for workers within the EU. In the European markets for consumer products (especially for food) these tendencies are reflected in augmented efforts that are undertaken to accentuate the national origin of domestic products. Empirical data of several EU member states will be analyzed and discussed. As a case study, the actual nationalistic tendencies of the Austrian consumer market will be parsed and integrated in a broader European picture. (author's abstract)