T-shirt Prices, Politics Highlight Complexity of Consumer Behavior

For Tomás Hahn ’23, the decision to participate in a data analysis competition sponsored by Bentley’s Center for Analytics and Data Science (CADS) was an easy one. 

That’s because the event — which offered students access to a robust data set collected during the inaugural Bentley-Gallup Force for Good Survey, a poll that quantifies if and to what degree Americans view businesses as having a positive impact on society — allowed him to “apply my academic learnings to real-world data.” Having learned from his professors that “collecting high-quality data sets can be both expensive and time-consuming,” Hahn, who graduated last month with a degree in Computer Information Systems and minors in Finance and Data Technologies, viewed the competition as a “rare and precious opportunity.” 

It’s a sentiment shared by the competition’s organizer, Nathan Carter, Wilder Teaching Professor of Mathematical Sciences and CADS director. “The Gallup data was an ideal choice because it was large and rich and on a topic Bentley students could really sink their teeth into,” he says of the multi-year survey, which polls more than 5,000 Americans at random to identify areas where people think businesses are contributing positively to society — and where they’re falling short. “For a data competition, you want there to be lots of different directions that students can take the material, so there’s not a single answer that everyone is striving to get to, but many possible insights. Since the Gallup survey asked so many different questions of respondents, it offered multiple avenues for insights.”  

Working in teams, students were given two weeks to explore the variables they found most interesting. Kejing Hu MSBA ’24, a graduate student in Bentley’s Master’s in Business Analytics program, and teammate Carol Yu MSBA ’24 began by sorting data. “We grouped survey questions into distinct categories, such as personal information, opinions about the social impact of businesses, and the influence of social impact on purchasing behavior,” she explains.  

Hu and Yu were particularly intrigued by a survey question asking respondents if they were willing to pay more for a plain T-shirt if they knew it was produced by a company committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR), and if so, the specific additional amount (with answer choices such as $0.00, $0.25-$2.50, $2.51-$5.00, $5.01-$10.00 and $10.01+) they’d be willing to pay. “This was the only question that asked respondents about an actual choice they would make as consumers,” Hu notes, and thus offered a “crucial data point for exploring the tangible impact of CSR on consumer behavior.” 

The official Force for Good survey report found, for example, that 63% of respondents were willing to pay more for a T-shirt from a company known for having a positive impact on the environment, with $7.00 as the highest median extra amount they'd pay. Besides a company's impact on the environment, the survey also asked respondents to indicate to what degree (extremely important, somewhat important, not very important or not at all important) they prioritized three other CSR examples — having a positive impact on the local community; treating employees well; and contributing to charities — and it was here that Hu and Yu decided to focus their analytical efforts.  

The pair were “fascinated,” Hu says, to discover that even when survey respondents ranked a specific CSR action as “not at all important,” they were still willing to pay a premium. For example, among the 8% of respondents who rated positive community impact as not important, 34% were willing to pay up to 60% more than the average T-shirt price. “This finding really highlights the complex nature of consumer behavior,” Hu says, and underscores the importance for businesses to “explore how they can leverage their social impact to increase both profits and consumer loyalty.” 

Hahn and teammates Mathaus Silva Jinno ’23, a fellow CIS major, and Will Malone ’23, who majored in Data Analytics and minored in Public Policy, were similarly drawn to the T-shirt survey question. Specifically, says Hahn, “we wanted to see if there was a correlation between an individual’s political views and the additional amount they would willingly pay for a socially responsible product.” After examining each respondents’ political affiliation (very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative and very conservative), they discovered a “distinct trend,” Hahn says: “very liberal” Americans are willing to spend up to twice as much as their “very conservative” counterparts. 

The team even developed their own metric to enhance their analysis. “As a data enthusiast, I was really interested in gathering insights from the respondents themselves,” says Silva Jinno, who combined individuals’ answers to two specific questions — how satisfied they feel about their lives right now, and how they anticipate feeling in five years — to establish a Life Satisfaction Growth (LSG) index. Cross-referencing the LSG value with respondents’ political affiliation, the team found that conservative Americans are generally less optimistic about future life satisfaction than those who consider themselves “very liberal.” 

“This kind of creativity is a great way to find insights that don’t appear to be in the data in the first place,” Carter says. “Overall, I was really impressed by the different ways teams combined multiple columns of data to create meaning.” Observing that the competition facilitated “fruitful and fun discussions” about analytical approaches among participating students and faculty, Carter says he’s looking forward to incorporating Bentley-Gallup Force for Good Survey data within the data science courses he teaches. 

It’s an approach that Hu enthusiastically endorses. “Bentley’s course offerings already have a strong emphasis on providing real-world case studies and equipping students with a comprehensive set of tools for learning data analysis,” she says. “CADS events like this one offer further opportunities to hone our abilities and prepare us for success in our future careers.”