Proposal of a Quantitative Evaluation Method for Social Acceptability of Products and Services

Eco-efficiency” has been viewed as a concept to compare the functions offered by industrial products and their environmental load[1]. For “sustainable consumption,” however, it is essential for consumers to consider sustainability when using industrial products, and to this end, it is essential to quantify the functions offered by products and to compare these with the environmental load. The environmental load can be calculated using the LCA method; however, quantitative evaluation of product functions offered to consumers, meaning “social acceptability,” has been considered difficult because of consumer subjectivity and the diversity of individual tastes. The objective of this research is to propose a new method to quantitatively evaluate social acceptability. This paper proposes a method that applies “Quality Function Deployment [2],” which has been used commonly in the field of industrial product design. First, consumer behaviors are classified into various life scenes (clothing life, dietary life, housing life, intellectual life, leisure life, and work life). It is considered that consumers select products based on the specific and specialized requirements for each behavior, and that the specific and concrete requirements for each behavior can be conceptually summarized into a upper and lower number of requirements such as “economy” and “convenience.” In this paper, the upper conceptual requirements are called “elemental requirements,” while the specific and concrete requirements for each behavior are called “secondary requirements.” The largest hypothesis is that the importance level of each item consisting of the elemental requirements is the same, even though the behaviors are different in each scene. If correct, by setting the importance level of each item consisting of the elemental requirements, the importance level can be deployed to the secondary requirements specific to each behavior. In addition, by measuring the individual products selected in each behavior using physical standards based on the secondary requirement items, consumer behavior related to the selection of individual products can be quantified. It is believed that this method can be applied not only to behaviors to select products, but also to quantify the social acceptability of the products and services that consumers use. In order to establish the above method, it is essential to extract the items consisting of the secondary requirements unique to each behavior and to determine the importance of each item. Based on this importance, it is essential to verify that behaviors, such as selection of products, can be quantified based on their importance. This paper reports on the results of examining the appropriateness of this method through a questionnaire.