Options for labelling circular products: Icon design and consumer preferences

Abstract

The demand of products that incorporate circular requirements depend on consumer perceptions. So effective communication is necessary between the product and consumers through product labelling. The use of specific icons facilitates this communication. This study presents a methodology for identifying the icons that best associate and identify consumers with the different design requirements that a circular product should meet. To do this, a set of icons for each circular requirement (upgrade, disassembly, lifetime extension, repairability and reuse) is presented to a representative sample of consumers who select the preferred one by taking into account different icon characteristics (simplicity, familiarity, semantic distance and aesthetic appeal). To validate the comprehension of the selected icons, ISO 9186-3 was applied to test the association of the selected icons with their corresponding requirement. Multinomial regression models were applied to explore whether any significant differences appeared among the responses obtained (icon selection) by the different respondent profiles. The most significant socio-economic variables were gender and age, while the most significant icon characteristics were semantic distance and aesthetic appeal. The results of this study could be useful for the companies committed to integrate the principles of circular economy into their product design since the use of selected icons can help consumers to identify them. Consumers' understanding is ensured due to the high percentages of correct answers obtained in the validation test (>85%).