Comparing the Recommendations of Buyers of Energy-Efficient and Inefficient Vacuum Cleaners
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The objective of this study is to examine the importance of consumer recommendation and word of mouth, also intend to clarify whether energy efficient buyers promoting energy efficiency of product design, and how the energy efficient appliances be used as promotors to the intentions/behavior in green marketing context. However, I have the following concerns:
- For this research introduction, which focus on the relationship between customer satisfaction, consumer recommendation and sustainable consumption. The topic is interesting and maybe important and beneficial. However, it seems that this study is in lack of strong theoretical foundation. If a quantitative study has no strong theoretical pillars, then the study results could be very week. Thus it is suggested that the author(s) need to review more recent papers (especially the recent 3 year papers) and develop a good model with fully theoretical support.
- The author(s) adopted NPS to identify the level of satisfaction in different groups. The author(s) has mentioned three research questions, but are these research questions fully answered by the empirical validation or some research questions are developed by deductive/ inductive reasoning. The hypotheses development is not clear enough.
- To evaluate convergent validity and discriminant validity of NPS, it is required that NPS scale should be compared with other satisfaction scales to verify their compatibility. if they are compatible, then the omission of the analysis of other satisfaction scale is ok. But right now, without confirming this issue, the results of NPS may not be convincing.
- The categorization of respondent group (Such as <1600watt / > 1600watt; green and low energy, non-green and low energy, high energy) are not clearly justified. The author(s) are required to do a confirmation. An official validation for testing these research questions should be done by experiential design. In this case, the manipulations of the group should be clear with a valid manipulation check. But in this study, manipulation check seems to be missing. Therefore, an alternative way to check the validity should be done.
- Conclusions should first of all respond to the author(s) research questions. This part seems to be missing. In addition, the author(s) need to provide more academic implications together with managerial implications.
- There are a lot of typos and grammar error, please check more carefully or send to proofread, so that the quality of the paper can be improved.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see our answers in the attachment as well as the new article version,
Kind regards
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
- Writing quality needs to be addressed, as are many extra or missing commas and sentence fragments throughout the paper.
- lines 52-54 "Customer satisfaction, recommendation and sustainable consumption is as a combination not broadly researched and will be addressed in the next paragraph. After which the quantitative measurement of culine 102 stomer satisfaction and recommendations will be addressed. Followed by the research questions."
- line 69 "And therefor often found of lesser importance than personal benefits, at least in the short term [13]
- line 86-87 "Basically condensing the measurement of satisfaction to one dimension by asking customers whether they would recommend the bought product or service to their family or friends."
- line 102 "our" should be "their"
- line 143 "Vacuum cleaners they bought for environmental or other reasons"
- line 164 "significant" should be replaced with "significantly"
- line 246 "are differing" should be replaced with "differ"
- .... many more, please proofread more carefully.
- What does this mean "This work also showed that the buying requirements of most low energy buyers don’t differ much from the high energy buyers except for a smaller group buying low energy for reason of its environmental friendliness" -- Did you statistically test whether there are between group differences? on what criteria? should be a table to show this.
- Is it possible that some portion of high energy customers might still rate themselves as highly environmentally friendly? Energy efficiency is not the only way to be environmentally conscious. Maybe an environmentally conscious consumer is thinking about where the product was made, the product's materials, maybe the store where the product was purchase is itself environmentally friendly, maybe the high energy product lasts longer and therefore does not end up in a landfill as quickly, etc. Differences between green and non-green consumers might be present in both high and low energy groups.
- I am confused by combining the green and non-green consumers in the low energy group simply because mean NPS was not significantly different between groups. The focus of the study is identifying if green consumers would cite environmental friendliness as a reason to recommend, but this effect would be washed out by combining these individuals with the non-green consumer group. In other words, the dependent variable may not differ, but the predictors might. I am wondeing if the groups were combined because there are simply not enough >5 NPS green consumers to include in the analysis as its own group. (less than 30 of them?) Might need to collect more data to test these effects.
- The study overall might be confounded by how consumers interpret "energy efficiency." This sounds like the product might be cheaper to operate given that less energy is required to run it? Is it possible that the low energy product is not environmentally friendly at all because you have to vacuum longer since it does not pick up dirt as effectively? This interpretation of the data should be tested directly rathe than just be stated as speculation: "Low energy buyers find other aspects (more?) important than high energy buyers and therefore judge on other criteria which might not even be directly related to energy efficiency" line 331-332
- Despite similar overall satisfaction scores for green and non-green consumers, the authors should test for different perceptions of the product's performance, and thus different bases for recommending or not recommending the product. Overall scores may have other differences embedded in them that could be revealed by assessing each group (green and non-green) separately. It seems like a huge inferential leap that "no difference in satisfaction between the green and non-green energy efficient buyers ... therefore all these buyers can be considered to be one consumer segment that can be served in the market with the same product designs and communications." line 350-352
- other factors account for satisfaction with low energy products, this is too vague and suggests that more than one group is present within this combined segment.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see our answers in the attachment as well as the new article version,
Kind regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
I will point out the main problems with your paper and then I will outline the steps to take to fix them. Hopefully, the revised version will be impeccable.
Starting with the abstract, the paper is poorly written. The text is choppy, terse, rife with flawed syntax, and often fuzzy or cryptic. As a result, the paper comes off as quite disjointed for the most part. Also, there are grammatical as well as a few typographical errors strewn here and there.
Here below are some examples of the above problems gleaned from just the abstract: [Note that these are just a few examples. A LOT more examples can be given from the entire paper.]
Although environmental awareness is higher every year and most people say they would prefer a more sustainable product there is still a gap to bridge between these intentions and actual buying behavior. [grammatical error]
“Can buyers of more energy efficient appliances be used as promotors to close the intentions/behavior gap?” [fuzzy writing; “close the intentions/behavior gap” ??]
“Three groups of customers have been compared; buyers who bought energy relatively inefficient models, and buyers of relatively energy efficient models who bought their model for either energy efficient or for other reasons.” [flawed syntax; sentence construction is incomplete; and a typo!]
Consumer satisfaction, energy efficiency, green marketing, product design, appliances, sustainable consumption and WoM should be reviewed from previous literature in details for constructing the research model.
There are instances of misplaced content (e.g., placing NPS data under “methodology”).
Material and Methods is well designed and organized.
However, the paper is riddled with citations, many of which are only peripheral.
The tables could be clearer and better formatted. Take Table 1 for instance. The asterisks should be explained in a legend (that is, under the table; * p<0.05, ** p<0.01 etc.). The column headings indicating coefficients and t-values could be aligned better with their respective values.
The title is not effective as it does not truly reflect the type and content of your research. In short, the paper has not been put together well and so, it does not flow well, thereby marring “readability”.
Final comment is to hire a capable copy-editor to help you complete these tasks.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see our answers in the attachment as well as the new article version,
Kind regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
This research seeks answers on whether the recommendations of buyers of energy-efficient vacuum cleaners have the potential to increase the consumption of energy-efficient models.
- This version is much more readable, better proofreading
- 132 -- extent (typo).
- 145-46 -- "All the vacuum cleaners under 1600 Watt were promoted as energy efficient and better for the environment." Were other performance factors mentioned as well? How do you test whether it is the environmentally friendly feature or the other determinants of satisfaction that drove the purchase?
- Need two conditions -- environmental friendliness as the sole benefit versus integrated with other attributes such as performance, quality and image -- to actually test the premise that marketers should not over emphasize environmental friendliness in their promotions.
- 187-204 -- repeats the section.
- 280 -- non-green low-energy (missing word)
- 373 -- the results state that input power was not related to performance perceptions, but the discussion suggests that emphasizing energy efficiency leads to lower NPS scores due to compromised performance (within the energy efficient vacuum group). If environmental friendliness is emphasized in the energy efficient condition rather than performance, wouldn't performance expectations be lower and thus not lead to disappointment?
- Further, if performance-related perceptions have a direct effect on NPS levels but are independent of input power, why would the reduced NPS be attributed to the environmental claims in the energy efficient group? the relationship between performance and NPS is present in both groups.
- Consumers of energy efficient products did not themselves emphasize this attribute in their recommendations but they did buy the energy efficient product in the first place when this attribute was promoted. Need to look at the reasons why the green low-energy vacuum group made their recommendation, many of them were dropped from this between group analysis because NPS<5.
- In general, I think the conclusions are overstated since the assumption of emphasizing environmental friendliness as the root cause of lower NPS ratings is an inferential leap. Performance is the same, lower performance expectations would be exceeded by actual performance being the same in both conditions, so it does not follow that consumers would rate performance and thus NPS lower.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you for you thorough review and see our rebuttal in the attached File
Kind regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
