Appendix A: Introduction text in survey and pretest
Date: Amsterdam, 7 May 2022
Dear participant,
Thank you for participating in this study. With this study, I strive to advise companies on their communication and marketing activities toward their target group, in order to maximize profits and enhancement of their brand image.
In this online survey, you will be exposed to a poster. I would like to invite you to carefully examine this poster and then answer some questions. This examination will take approximately 3 minutes. Furthermore, we are only interested in your opinion, so there are no right or wrong answers. Only participants who are 18 years of age or older may participate in this study.
The study is performed under the responsibility of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Amsterdam. Therefore, the following aspects are guaranteed for the respondents:
(1) Your anonymity is guaranteed and your answers or data will under no circumstances be passed on to third parties unless you have given your express permission in advance.
(2) You can refuse to participate in the survey or cancel your participation prematurely without stating your reasons. You can also withdraw your permission afterward (within 7 days after participation) for the use of your answers or data for the study.
(3) There will be no significant risk or inconvenience for you by participating in the survey, nor will you be deliberately misled. You will not be exposed to material that is explicitly offensive.
(4) You can obtain information about the general results of the study no later than five months after the end of the study.
If you would like to know more about this research, you can contact Floor Wiersma at any time (floor.wiersma@student.uva.nl).
I hope to have informed you sufficiently and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you in advance for your contribution to this research.
Kind regards, Floor Wiersma
Appendix B: Conditions and stimulus material survey
Condition 1: Existing line / low fit Condition 2: Green line extension / low fit
Note: consider brand T&Z as one of the world’s global leading multinational clothing brands.
T&Z is a multinational clothing brand. T&Z’s collections respond to the newest fashion trends and their clothing is low priced and has low quality. T&Z focuses on young consumers that want to get along with the trend of that moment.
To respond to the demands of consumers to get along with the latest trends of that time, T&Z manages to offer a new clothing collection every two weeks. By focusing on these temporary trends, T&Z stimulates consumers to keep buying new clothing that is trending at that particular moment.
Please examine the advertisement for T&Z's existing clothing line.
Note: consider brand T&Z as one of the world’s global leading multinational clothing brands.
T&Z is a multinational clothing brand. T&Z’s collections respond to the newest temporary fashion trends and their clothing is low priced and has low quality. T&Z focuses on young consumers that want to get along with the trend of that moment.
The multinational is criticized for its non-sustainable business efforts, such as low wages in factories, high numbers of pollution and waste, and their stimulation of over-consumption, by offering various new collections throughout the year. To respond to this criticism, T&Z has come up with a plan to launch a sustainable clothing line, as an addition to their existing clothing line, where the company makes use of organic cotton.
Please examine the advertisement for T&Z's new sustainable clothing line.
Condition 3: Existing line / high fit Condition 4: Green line extension / high fit
Note: consider brand T&Z as one of the world’s global leading multinational clothing brands.
T&Z is a multinational company that sells
comfortable, premium-quality clothing. The lifecycle of the clothing that T&Z produces is long, due to the enhanced quality and the more basic clothing that they are selling, which is a major pro for the process of decreasing overconsumption and fashion waste.
T&Z offers only four collections each year: one collection per season. This amount of new
collections is much lower in comparison with other companies. Other companies mainly respond to contemporary trends and therefore offer new collections every two weeks. In contrast, T&Z focuses on sustained trends that do not change that often.
Please examine the advertisement for T&Z's existing clothing line.
Note: consider brand T&Z as one of the world’s global leading multinational clothing brands.
T&Z is a multinational company that sells
comfortable, premium quality clothing. The lifecycle of the clothing that T&Z produces is long, due to the enhanced quality and the more basic clothing that they are selling, which is a major pro for the process of decreasing overconsumption and fashion waste. In comparison with other companies that focus on temporary trends, T&Z focuses on sustained fashion trends and therefore offers only 4 collections each year.
To respond to the urgent matter to become more sustainable throughout T&Z’s business efforts, T&Z decided to launch a sustainable clothing line, as an addition to their existing clothing line, where they make use of organic cotton.
Please examine the advertisement for T&Z's new sustainable clothing line.
Appendix C: Questionnaire survey
After exposure to one of the 4 conditions’ stimuli (see appendix B), the following questions were asked in a new block:
After these questions, respondents were forwarded to the next block, consisting of demographic questions.
Appendix D: Test of Normality
Various normality tests were conducted to see if the survey data does not statistically differ from a normal distribution and, therefore, can be seen as representable to make statements regarding the target group in this research: individuals that live in the Netherlands.
First, A multivariate normality test is performed to see if the variables statistically significantly differ from a normal distribution so that the residuals are equally distributed for the scale variables environmental involvement and parent brand evaluation. If this normal distribution is assumed, regression or ANOVA analysis can be conducted. As seen in figure 7, the Skewness and Kurtosis statistics and standard error scores are close to 0, which is a determinant of a normal distribution. Only the Kurtosis statistic’s score is a high (2.01).
However, this study controlled for this potential threat by assigning more than 40 respondents per condition, as seen in table 13 (appendix E). In summary, besides the somewhat high score on the Kurtosis statistic, these variables are perceived as normally distributed and can be used in further regression and ANOVA analysis.
Moreover, by plotting the observed and expected cumulative probability of standardized residuals (P-plot), the assumptions of linearity are measured. In graph 9, the p-plot values are tightly waving along with the linear curve. Therefore, the assumption of linearity is met. The assumption of a normal distribution is also met by exploring this normal distribution of the respondents’ answers concerning the parent brand evaluation (see graph 10). Moreover, a scatter-dot graph is constructed to explore if the residuals are equally variable to test the assumption of homogeneity, which was aligned as well (graph 11).
Lastly, the potential outliers were identified by making Z-scores of numerical variables and seeing if there are scores over 2. Moreover, predictors should not be highly correlated as it would make the effect allocation on the dependent variable difficult. However, all constructs scored below 5, which means no collinearity was detected. After running all these tests, it can
be concluded that the derived data does not significantly differ from a normal distribution and, therefore, can be used in regression analysis which is generalizable to the target group of this research.
Table 12. Normality-check of scale constructs.
N statistic
Minimum statistic
Maximum statistic
Mean Statistic
St.
deviation statistic
Skewness Kurtosis Statistic Std.
Error
Statistic Std.
Error Env.
involvement 207 1.00 7.00 5.76 0.99 -0.93 0.17 2.01 0.38
Parent brand evaluation
207 1.00 7.00 3.85 1.44 -0.86 0.17 -0.89 0.38
Graph 9. Linearity assumption P-plot.
Graph 10. Normal distribution assumption plot.
Graph 11. Scatter-dot analysis for the assumption of homogeneity.
Appendix E: Descriptive tables of respondents’ characteristics per condition.
Table 13. Number of respondents per condition.
Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4 Total Respondents 60 (29.0%) 50 (24.2%) 49 (23.7%) 48 (23.2%) 207 (100%)
Table 14. Distribution of gender per condition.
Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4 Total
Female 31 (26.3%) 27 (22.9%) 34 (28.8%) 26 (22.0%) 118 (100%)
Male 29 (33.0%) 23 (26.1%) 14 (15.9%) 22 (25.0%) 88 (100%)
Figure 15. Distribution of age per condition.
Age group Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 3 Condition 4 Total
< 18 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%)
18-24 17 (8.3%) 18 (8.7%) 21 (10.2%) 16 (7.8%) 72 (35.0)
25-34 8 (3.9%) 5 (2.4%) 6 (2.9%) 12 (5.8%) 31 (15.0%)
35-44 7 (3.4%) 6 (2.9%) 5 (2.4%) 3 (1.5%) 21 (10.2%)
45- 54 13 (6.3%) 8 (3.9%) 5 (2.4%) 7 (3.4%) 33 (16.0%)
55-64 14 (6.8%) 13 (6.3%) 11 (5.3%) 9 (4.4%) 47 (22.8%)
65+ 1 (0.05%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (0.05%) 2 (1.0%)