Digital Consumption
Smartphones, tablets, social media, online forums, blogs, and smartphone apps now play a central role in consumers' everyday practices. How we exercise, listen to music, shop, form relationships and have fun have been transformed by digitalisation. Major changes in commerce, such as the application of artificial intelligence and associated digital technologies, are transforming both commerce and consumption. For example, our research has looked at how sustainability apps and social media help consumers to consume sustainably and ethically in their everyday lives. We have studied the relationship of consumers to the collection of digital data for commercial purposes and data-driven advertising. And we have studied data-driven approaches to modelling techniques.
Within this group, we also study those working with the new digital marketing systems in e-commerce. We view consumption as a complex phenomenon that necessarily includes not only consumers but also marketers and the many technologies and other instruments that shape consumption. To investigate the digitalisation of consumption, we often use ethnographic methods that allow us to follow consumers and other actors and their actions both online and off, but also quantitative methods with a data-driven approach.
Ongoing research projects include exploring consumer attitudes to digital data collection and data-driven targeted advertising, consumer attitudes to new digital services and platforms for more sustainable clothing consumption, as well as the research on the work of e-commerce managers.
